Speeches of 26 July 2018
ROUND TABLE A1 : Family, parenthood and migration
Maria Inês Assumpção Fernandes & Simone Piñeiro Bressan Robles (PUC-Rio/USP/Paris Descartes)
The group clinical dimension in psychosocial work with families: aspects of violence
In general terms, the work raises the question of the psychologist’s field of intervention in the care of families in institutions of the social assistance network (CRAS). It is necessary to think the field of intervention in the specificity of the intersubjective psychic work in close relation with the social questions that are object of social assistance action: to think about the relationship among the subject of rights – citizen subject – and, the subject of the unconscious. The intervention device was the grupo operativo, the intervention proposed by Pichon-Rivière. The aim-public were the families in breach of conditionalities of the Bolsa Família Program, from the third suspension, due to the reason for low school attendance of their members between 06 and 17 years. In the group process, the main emergents were domestic and intergeneration violence, helplessness, female incarceration, humiliation and shame. Without the possibility of naming, these affective experiences were being deposited in the family bonds, expressing through the symptom of school dropout.
Keywords: group clinical, psychosocial work, violence, family.
Philippe DRWESKI (France)
Effects of expatriation on the family psychic envelope
This presentation offers a reflection on the action of family envelopes in the framework of expatriation. The concept of envelope is here illustrated in order to comprehend the passage between different spaces, a distinctive feature of expatriation. The hypothesis is that expatriation is a critical moment in the action of the envelopes which affects the therapeutic framework of the families we see in consultation. After a preliminary review of the concept of envelop, the presentation then, offers a clinical illustration of a family therapy. This analysis allows to illustrate the work of the family envelope and of its plastic qualities in the context of mobility. It appears that expatriation, due to the distancing of traumatic elements part of family history, can regulate family functioning. The therapist must integrate this dimension to work with families more and more numerous to live expatriation in the contemporary world.
Key words: family envelope, expatriation, hybridisation, connection, mobility
Terezinha Féres Carneiro, Renata Mello & Andrea Seixas Magalhães (PUC-Rio/USP/Paris Descartes)
Parent-child role inversion in the family: intrapsychic, intersubjective and social dimensions
Taking as central themes the processes of child maturation and the exercise of parenthood, the present work proposes to investigate the parent-child role inversion problem in the clinic with families. We are referring here to the process of parentification, in which the child begins to assume the parental functions, giving up his/her own needs to accommodate to the needs of his/her parents. When parents parentify their children, the difference between generations is denied and the child is considered a miniature adult. The parent-child role inversion is discussed in this work from a triple listening key, inspired by Jean-G. Lemaire, contemplating intrapsychic, intersubjective and social aspects. To enrich the discussion about this problem, an illustration is presented through clinical vignettes. The importance of the analyst is to understand the impact of parent-child role inversion on the emotional development of children, especially when this role inversion becomes a privileged way in the relationship between parents and children.
Keywords: parenting, child development, parent-child role inversion, parentification, clinical listening.
Alexandra BERNARD & Almudena SANAHUJA (Université de Besançon, France)
Affiliation to the price of migration
This paper focuses on the psychic processes of family transmissions, strongly imbued with cultural beliefs, at the work of young African migrants, who leave alone without their family, risking their lives. At the age of becoming adults, they were designated to leave, they are “the blessed child”, chosen by the parents, as defined by the cultural myth of their community, to ensure the survival of the family group, but also its narcissistic enhancement. They embody the hope of a better future, or they are obliged to write the page of success of the family novel. It is at this price, that they will be able to have a place within their families. In the course of this paper, we will try to understand how young migrants are subject to their family ties, and how migration intervenes as part of an affiliation process that comes into play in the identity construction of the subject. a family balance, strongly influenced by cultural beliefs.
Keywords : Migration, transmission, cultural beliefs, affiliation, roman family process.
ROUND TABLE A2 : IPA REFLECTION GROUP
Mary Morgan, Jill Scharff, Timothy Keogh & David Scharff
Presented by the International Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (COFAP)
Multicultural perspectives on couple and family process: Social and historical considerations.
This panel will begin with a 20-minute video of a family with three young children in the mid-phase of family therapy, conducted in English, and shown with French and Spanish subtitles. The family story begins with the parent’s sexual dysfunction and their concern over the developmental difficulty in their youngest boy, and family therapy shows their connection to the family history of childhood sexual and physical abuse in the parents’ childhood.
Then other members of COFAP will discuss how they see this matter from the standpoint of 1) the developmental trauma involved in the case and 2) perspectives on cultural, social and historical links and contexts. This will lead on to the main part of the session which will comprise a free-ranging discussion among all members of the audience and the panelists.
This large group discussion will explore social and historical perspectives on family and couple processes, not only in the case presented, but expanding to those issues in general. This examination of the impact of multicultural and current social issues on families is sponsored by the IPA’s Committee on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (COFAP). We want to introduce the session participants to the research that COFAP is conducting on the varieties of approaches to contemporary problems of couples and families from a range of social and cultural contexts in various regions of the house. All members of the international community are invited to join in this group discussion.
ROUND TABLE A3 : Family story, Social story
Eric SMADJA
Historicity and “fabrication” of contemporary couples: A pluri- and interdisciplinary approach
The couple is a contemporary notion corresponding to a living reality which is historical, sociocultural, as well as sexual-bodily and psychic (groupal, intersubjective and intrapsychic-individual). In addition, contemporary couples–who seek counseling increasingly frequently and increasingly early in their lives together–have, in my opinion, become instable, fragile, polymorphous and demanding. Bringing with them centuries and centuries of historicity, recent changes, diverse in nature, in particular since the 1960s-1970s, have contributed to “fabricating” them so, and to producing crisis in them which is both an identity crisis and identificatory in nature.
So, I propose to offer an understanding of this contemporary critical reality and its multidimensional nature which, owing to its complexity, will require fruitful recourse to a pluri- and interdisciplinary approach combining history, sociology and psychoanalysis. This methodological choice will shed light on the interdependency of each of the dimensions of the couple and that of the factors contributing to the fabrication of those couples.
Keywords: couple-contemporary-historicity-fabrication-pluridisciplinary
Meriem MOKDAD ZMITRI
When family stories rewrite national History : About political violence and family resilience
There are types of resilience that only a family is able to activate among its members and in its links. When a nation endures dictatorships, mass traumas, violences and political instrumentalizations, couples and families feel threatened in their quietness and their links could strenghten or weaken. Indeed, this reflection is born among Tunisian couples and families dealing with political and social mutations in post-revolt context. The speaker wants to share this experience with the aim of thinking about modalities and conditions in resilient families of a work of rewriting national history invoking their transgenerational heritage, their beliefs, their political, cultural and cultual history against violence effects. This trial to conceptualize clinic will also be enriched by a comparative anthropological perspective.
Key words: Mass violence – family resilience – political instrumentalization – national History – family stories
Lídia Levy & Isabel Cristina Gomes
Analysis of the inherited certainties in the work of deconstruction
Throughout the generations, the family and culture have attributed to men and women certain roles shaped by patriarchal ideology, which have been slowly deconstructed. The references to masculinity in the past associated with virility and power have gradually been destabilized on the basis of feminism and consequent gender equality. The masculinity and femininity today require permanent repositioning of individuals. The clinical experience reveals the paradoxes arising from the encounter between the old patterns of socialization, transmitted generationally, and the new possibilities of subjective construction. In the relational play observed between intimate partners, the messages transmitted about the role of them in the relationship provoke noises that lead to conflicts in the intersubjective space. According to the fragments of a couple psychotherapy, we will discuss the influence of the generational legacy in the constitution and maintenance of the conjugal linkage and the move of clinical work towards new constructions.
Key-words: couple psychoanalysis – family – culture – generational transmission
ROUND TABLE A4 : Place of belief in families and couples
María Fernanda de Dávila
What constructs life are the places, inhabited by people that establish a link, create among us an experience: the Being with the other.
We will study from the Vincular Clinic the experience of the “Survivors of Los Andes” in the accident of the Uruguayan Air Force in October of 1972, againt a mountain of 4000 mts height and 20º degrees bellow zero.
When they rescuet 16 passangers after 72 days.
We assimilate the experience of a device in a psychotherapy when it is created in a net a corpus with a disposition of practices and mechanisms to confront an urgency and acquire an affect that demanded a psychic positioning that will gestate their own rescue and a subjectivity with potency, thinking, to know how to do with himself and with the other.
When the physical and psychic life is preserved in circunstance of extreme adversity?
Key words: accident, link, beliefs, potency, fantasies, experience, device, rescue.
Alina ILIESCU
The efraction of the body and Children of the Order in the Communism
This paper aims to elaborate the labour of the Romanians families who have resisted the violence of efraction of the body and intimacy, along with the banning of abortion and the obligation to keep the pregnancies imposed by the communist regime.
What can be more humiliating for a human person than forbidding the control and linking with his own body? The woman was transformed into a making children machine. What was transmitted from those mothers to these children born although they were not wanted, invested, fantasied?
Exactly as in the totalitarian states, children no longer belonged to the family, their parents lost their role, and the dictator became the ultimate father. Finally, these children will kill their “Dictator Father” 23 years later, in 1989 Revolution, when the entire execution squad was buildup of children born after the 1966 Decree, the so-called “Children of the Order”.
These families express in psychotherapy the need to explore these old contents that have remained locked up in the form of family secrets, unwanted, neglected, undigested, at a crude stage of beta elements. Through this work, I propose a process of elaboration allowing those things to be said, heard and understood, so that the suffering will not be silenced and repressed anymore.
Keywords : Body fracture – Children of the decree – Communist regime – Prohibition of abortion – Dead parenthood – Forbidding the control of your body – Children of the dictator – Family investment of children – Attack of the link – Loudspeaker – Internal group – Family tutoring – depository – Transgenerational inheritance – Family secrets – Denegative Pact – Family violence – Mourning – Crypt – The ghost – The bearer of the unconscious shame – Fusion – Persecution – Fantasy of incorporation – Abstinence in canning – Abraham Totok – Abandon – Group Illusion – Elaboration of the trauma
Thomas von Salis
Why religion? – Need to maintain authoritarian structures.
Old anthropology teaches that “savage” peoples must by all means be forced to adhere to a religion. It is proposed in this paper to consider that the zeal with which one wanted to convert the population of the colonies did not represent as much the will to bring them the salvation nor to promote the faith, but to eradicate homes of non-belief to supreme authority beyond earthly nature. The latter provides an excuse or justification for the dominance exercised everywhere in the world by the colonizing powers.
If the colonized peoples had been allowed to practice a politics based on consent in groups or in the collective, the unthinkable could have been thought. In order to deepen the study of resistance in analytic work, it will be advisable not to confine ourselves to the concepts of the theory of drives, but to study the dominant ideologies that exert an influence in the context of family treatment.
Keywords: Anthropology – Epiphany of God – Colonization – Authoritarianism – Analytical Family Therapy
ROUND TABLE A5 : Family story, Cultural story
Carla MARTINS MENDES & Fernanda RIBEIRO PALERMO (Université PUC-RIO, Brésil)
From the fantasy of samba and carnival to the reality of paternity
The increase of bicultural relationships leads to a reflection on intergenerational psychic transmission. On the basis of a clinical case, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of intergenerational transmission in the establishment of paternity in a migratory context. This takes into account the belonging and inclusion of children into their parent’s cultures. A father of German origin emigrates to Brazil having learned of his paternity, fruit of an occasional relationship with a Brazilian woman. After three years in Brazil, he resorts to TFP as a result of cultural conflicts in his son’s education. We then note that the family relationship is marked by transgenerational psychic inheritances where shame and the unspoken have repercussions in the establishment of paternity and in the process of acculturation.
Keywords: psychic transmission; culture; emigration; paternity; shame
Patrícia SEGURADO-NUNEZ & Rui CINTRA (Portugal)
The History and the stories in the life and work of Eça de Queiroz
“Art is a summary of nature made by imagination”
Eça de Queiroz in The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes
Literature is, like the dream, the place of unconscious narrative manifestations. In Portugal, Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900), considered by many, the greatest Portuguese prose writer and the most notable representative of Realism, an artistic and literary movement that emerged in France in the 18th century, characterized by the description of society through the reality of the experiences and feelings of the time. Eça left a vast romanesque work transforming Portuguese literature and culture.
As a writer he portrayed an entire generation from the point of view of desire, exposing the repression of bourgeois sexuality and the distortions of the repression of that desire. In his writing myths, phantoms and secrets cross.
This contemporary of Freud paints in his work, the amorous pursuits of his characters and transgenerational unconscious manifestations that preside to the constitution of familiar and love links, in a permanent dialogue between biographical aspects and his fantasy.
Keyword: Literature, Secrets, Myth, Phantom, Sexuality, Transgenerational
Marcelo LABAKI-AGOSTHINO (Brésil)
Documents, mournings and tortures: a historical approach for the understanding of the psychic trauma
Three clinical vignettes;
The first vignette: a family wonders if an envelope closed for over 70 years probably containing family secrets of past generations should be opened. Will this past help the family resignify current conflicts offering a new history to the family?
The second vignette: elaborating a family mourning, when the family members, who rebuild the dead mother’s sacred place in Afro-Brazilian rituals, appropriate themselves of the African culture.
The third vignette: a parallel between the historical moment of the National Truth Commission that carried out investigations on tortures during Brazil’s military dictatorship and a clinical work during which the patient remembers an uncle who was a torturer and the analyst who remembers an uncle tortured by dictatorship.
I will show how understanding one’s own family history, connected to historical events, can help elaborate family and individual traumas.
ROUND TABLE A6 : Trauma in clinical work with couples and families
Cindy VINCENTE (Université de Besançon, France)
“You’re Eliminated”: The Historical Footprint of Genocide, a Paradigm for Understanding Contemporary Families
Today, more and more families are in need of help but are unable to meet together. Faced with this specificity, the clinician has a first work of analysis to decide what is cultural, social, historical in relation to the specificity of psychic processes intrapsychic, intersubjective and transpsychic. This leads us to specify different clinical experiments around this problem of “families not able to meet in therapy”. We will rely more specifically on the clinical experience of families who experienced genocide in previous generations in order to highlight the unconscious psychic impact of the Great War on the processes involved in contemporary family therapies.
Henri-Pierre BASS (France)
The impact of totalitarian thought on intrafamilial ties and relationships.
Social violence and cumulative trauma. Impact of totalitarian thought in intrafamilial ties and couples. How to support a therapeutic area while the permanence of the social framework disintegrates. What internal positioning does the analyst have to maintain to support a development process that does not run up against its own ethical limits?
Keywords : Totalitarian thought; Social violence; Ethical limits; Therapeutic area; Intrafamilial links.
Jean-Louis DOREY (France)
Family link and Genocide
We will show in this work how during the ongoing process of a psychoanalytical family therapy a set of defense mechanisms initially hides the violence and the hate. The therapeutic process supported by the progressive recomposition of the family link, unfreezes the pulsionality, remobilizes the blocked affects and liberates the dimension of guilt. The return of the conflictuality and of the interfantasmatization finally allows to skim the surface of the genealogical envelope caused by the disaster.
In conclusion, the family reconstructs its link around a mythical scenario of its origins.
Key words: genocide, hate, untidiness, reintrication, pulsions.
ROUND TABLE A7 : Exile and migration
Thames W. BORGES (France/ Brésil), Ana Larticia R. NUNES (Brésil), Cigala P. IGLESIAS (Brésil) & Marie Rose MORO (France)
Family’s stories in exile : the Transcultural Clinical setting
Transmission is the fertilizer of a family lineage, a clan, a group. When traveling, one moves into the unknown which can produce fear. The migratory phenomenon is always accompanied by a process of uprooting that weakens the cultural envelope of families making them more vulnerable to somatic and psychic expression on suffering. This process can compromise the balance in family’s dynamics. When bonds weaken, social integration becomes more difficult and there is a risk of social and collective exclusion.
We consider to walk a path with families in a context of uprooting, migration and exile. A path drawn in the co-construction of the meaning given to the psychic suffering. Creating from the drawings and stories, where the imaginary representation of this suffering carried by the narrativity of each family and impregnated by the cultural and counter-transferential elements.
In transcultural consultation, the traveling families are invited to re-register their history, their migratory past, with the intention of counting, recounting, putting words understanding this as a necessary step to rebuild the bonds. Finally, the therapist’s return to his / her own migratory path, cultural decentration and the importance of culture to give meaning are fundamental elements in the transcultural approach to understanding the suffering linked to parenting in uprooting condition.
Key words : Parenting, Migration, uproothing, narrativity, trancultural clinic
Frédérique GIBERT (France, Apsylien)
I will present the work of family support in pairs of a family confronted with Alzheimer’s disease of the mother. I will analyze the need to put in place various leaflets of group devices to contain the persecution and family melancholy generated by the collective traumas of the Algerian war that come in « telescoping » with individual and family traumas. I will present the need to work inter transfer on different professional interfaces to treat the lethal that emerges in the work in the trans and intergenerational families and the care teams.
Keywords : History, family, trauma, war, uprooting, illness
Svetlana HIERS (Université Paris Descartes, France/Russie)
Man Yama. Treatment of self-fracturing.
Our thinking is about the ordinary man in the crosshairs of history, from psychotherapy to an applicant for political asylum in France and his wife. The man was kidnapped and held for six months in a secret prison at the time of the second Chechen war. Their dramatic family history is specific to this conflict when the Russian state instituted a system of violence and fear, whose cornerstone is torture. The abductions echo the fate of their grandparents, deported the Chechen people in January 1944. The questions that drive us are how to integrate the experience of the unspeakable in family life? How their story is part of transgenerational history of their clan ( “TEIP”)? How to treat post-traumatic psychosis whencruelty is theexpressionof the power of a totalitarian regime?
Keywords : Applicant for political asylum – Violence state – Torture – Traumatic Dissociation – Trauma Clinic
ROUND TABLE A8 : Family configuration and everyday life
Graciela ANGELOZ & Matías LUZURIAG (Argentine)
The Myth of the Family. Destination and freedom
Within this thematic area, it is interesting to review the concept of family, or the myth of the family, highlighting about how much of our behaviors in our daily life are the result of free and beneficial choices, and how much of these may be in fact determined by the stereotypes and cultural patterns of the past, which may currently be generating more conflicts than solutions.
According to the Theory of the Social Representations (RS), expressed by Moscovici in Psychoanalysis, its Image and its Public (1961), we propose to study and review the scope (positive and beneficial aspects) and the limitations of perceptions (stereotyped, rigid and outdated elements) that we found in Western countries and within the family institution.
For this, it’s important in a first place, to review men and women’s stereotypes presented in our western societies.
Keywords : Man, woman, family myth, stereotypes, family institution
Catherine WEISMANN-ARCACHE (Université de Rouen, France)
The grip and the harrow. School bullying and family links
The term of school bullying is relatively recent, it is defined and taken into account by the National Education. This term meant the harrow, an agricultural tool designed to work the land relentlessly, to break it. We question the predominance of narcissistic parenting scenarios in the foundations of the family history of these harassed subjects, and the development of intra-family relationships. The etymology of conjugal words comes from the word yoke, which means “to attach, to harness”, but also to “submit”. It is at the root of the verb subjugate which associates seduction with the influence. Our “harrow and yoke” metaphor invites exploration and understanding of the subjective and intersubjective modalities and issues that occur in the family and at school, in the context of bullying. Four clinical vignettes will put into perspective family consultations and individual interviews with adolescents. Keyxords : School bullying, family, grip, seduction, narcissistic scenario
Christine PEIFFER (Université Paris Descartes, France)
Ibrahim at school : a rocky road, same as the one of his family to get to France
In spite of the law for children with disabilities (2005.02.11), going to an ordinary school can be very difficult for some children : Ibrahim’s story, a 5 year old boy with autism, tells us about it. His diruptive and painful behaviour clearly expresses his misunderstanding of the world in which he is thrown. His great anxiety is projected on those who look after him and through projective identification, feelings of helplessness are very strong among teachers and professional carers. This anxiety also leads to violent conducts toward the groups where the child is, specially at school. It may be linked to what Ibrahim had to face … and maybe to what his family had to face when it arrived to France, some decades ago. The interviews led with Ibrahim’s father help us to understand better how traumatics events seem to be repeated.
Keywords :Pupil, autism, family, exil, traumatisms
ROUND TABLE A9 : Couple, historization and therapeutic process
Louise ATANI-TORASSO (France)
Couples distress : toxic (hi)storicizing of the conjugal bond
This paper draws on the research work the autor has previously conducted on how, in the context of domestic violence, a subject emerges that is capable of establishing links with his own self, with others than himself, with the plurality of human beings and the world at large. Her question is how can one construe the distress within couples that are confronted with domestic violence in light of the historicizing of the bond between them, and of their subjective identity? In psychoanalysis, the (hi)story of a subject is elaborated through the integration of infantile (Freud, 1905, 1912-1913), juvenile (Benhaim, Rassial, Delaroche and Douville, 2006), and adult experiences (Gutton, 2013. In this paper, which is based on material from clinical interviews with nine couples, the autor explores the hypothesis that it is toxic for a couple to (hi)storicize their present intersubjective experience and all that has been transmitted to them interculturally and intra- and inter- generationally. She analyzes the key modalities of the toxicity of (hi)storicizing -œdipal desires, transitional space, psychic temporality and transference processes. She then presents a clinical case.
Keywords : couple therapy, domestic violence, toxic historicising
Carl BAGNINI (Etats-Unis)
A tale of two treatments: a couple returns to treatment ten years later
This case study describes two treatments with the same couple, ten years apart. The issues discussed include the meanings of unconscious and temporal time on past and present therapy process and the therapy triad. The therapist faces his feelings about the results of limited working through in the first treatment, and re-examines the multiple influences of unconscious and temporal time on the unresolved unconscious issues when conducting the second treatment. Couple life cycle changes and the transferences and countertransference are explored.
Key Words: unconscious time, termination, internalization, transference, countertransference.
Christine MOISSENET (France)
An accelerated process
Revisiting the analytical work in a couple therapy, I shall try to analyse the acceleration of its evolution process, through the junction of temporal dimensions – past, present and future – of each partner and of the therapist.
I shall look into how the current environment may impact the work space and provoke a trauma (“violent shock”) that “breaks into” and “affects the overall system/pattern/organisation” Laplanche and Pontalis) and awakens the matricide fantasies in the couple.
The initiated separation movement is therefore accelerated.
Key words : history, couple, symptoms, trauma, repetition, framework under attack
ROUND TABLE A10 : Tyranny, expatriation and exile
Manon BOURGUIGNON (Université de Lausanne, Suisse)
Destiny of traumatic transmission at the time of becoming parent: the case of children of Chilean political exiles in Switzerland.
Psychic transmission is the basis of psychic constitution and continuity of civilization. Within our research, we are interested in the fates of traumatic transmission: what happens when the children of victims of collective violence become parents in exile? In the time of becoming a parent in exile, what is the psychic work of subjectivation of the legacy of collective trauma? These questions are explored in the specific case of the children of Chilean political exiles who live today in Switzerland. The first results show a process of subjectivizing appropriation and a process of differentiation in front of the weight of traumatic heritage. In fact, reassessments of identity in the time of parenthood put to work identifications that are enrolled among a cultural, generational and temporal network. This work of elaboration of the inheritance seems to offer to the descendant a place in the family group as well as in the social group.
Key-words: Trauma transmission; parenthood; exile.
Cristina CALARASANU (Roumanie)
Words of Tyranny.
Every day we hear words, but are we still listening the way they reach us? Extremism, totalitarianism, terrorism, fundamentalism, these are the words to name the danger, the enemy, the fear, but where can we find their traces in the World History? Can we read the present into the past or the future into today? Hannah Arendt, Victor Klemper, Czeslaw Milos, Václav Havel, Albert Camus, Fiodor Dostoievski, Eugène Ionesco, Peter Pomerantsev, here are just of a few names who saw coming the words of tyranny. A short linguistic history through nazisme and communism will show both the emptiness and the strangeness of the tyranny language and his magic and fascination. The paper, written under the motto: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world ((Ludwig Wittgenstein) will approach ideas as double-thinking, post-truh, totalitarianism, emergency and exception, utopian control, novlang. If the the sleep of reason produces monsters, words of tyranny are the « rhynoceros » (E. Ionesco) parents.
Keywords : Language, Tyranny, World History, Totalitarianism, Limits
Judith LORENTE, Inés ARAMBURU, Josep MERCADAL, Carles PEREZ-TESTOR (Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, España)
Impact of discrimination and communication of origins in self-concept and ethnic identity in a group of internationally adopted adolescents.
From a sample of internationally adopted adolescents and their respective families, we present a study with quantitative methodology that aims to evaluate the impact of discrimination and the communication of origins in the self-concept, ethnic identity and psychosocial adaptation of the less. In the presentation the objectives and the methodology used will be presented. In addition, the concepts of ethnic identity and self-concept are reviewed in the framework of adoption from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Keywords: Self-concept, Ethnic Identity, Adoption, Adolescence
ROUND TABLE A11 : Lanus’s Reflection group. Polygamy: past, present, past in the present.
Valentin BARENBLIT, Guillermo y Léa BIGLIANI, S. y R. MOGUILLANSKY & Carlos SZLUSKI
Freud used historical cuts, novels and myths to test his theories and to build them. The television report about a family from northeastern Brazil, can offer us a model to think socio-psycho-anthropological tendencies and unconsciously determined family configurations. Dreams may contain all the determinations of the unconscious, a fragment of history aired by a television report may contain invariants of family desires. We intend to reflect on a peculiar configuration that involves a sertanejo, several wives and a progeny of fifty children. We will reflect on:Polygamy, a) in Brazil among its original inhabitants and colonizers, b) as a current way of “stabilizing” families, c) related to the desire for vengeful fraternal “theft”, d) and oedipal desires in the relationship mother-in-law/son in law, e) and the subject of power in the compulsion to set some one pregnant and/or to get pregnant, f) infidelity during pregnancy.
PLENARY SESSION 1 : History in the world
René Kaës (France)
Metamorphoses of the Topic of Link : Multiplicity, Heterogeneity and Singularity
In the first part of my paper I shall deal with a brief history of the concept of link in psychoanalysis. I shall endeavour to convey that many practical and theoretical models have arisen one after the other, some of them borrowing concepts from other fields and incorporating them culturally into the psychoanalytical corpus. Therefore, the topic of link has evolved, and we must distinguish its important implications regarding the construction of the device and framework, the approach to the transferance – countertransferance field, the listening and the interpretation.
In the second part I shall introduce a new topic, centred around the categories of Multiplicity, Heterogeneity and Singularity. I shall explain to what extent Multiplicity, Heterogeneity and Singularity are constituent parts of the combining processes of psychic spaces and temporalities compared to, and – by virtue of their differences and similarities – interfering with, each other.
In the third part I shall put these categories to work in the analysis of contemporary malaise, suggesting that the links undergo the disorganising effects of excess or of the lack of multiplicity, heterogeneity and singularity.
Janine PUGET (Argentine)
What to do with history and stories in everyday life?
Everyone’s story and stories undoubtedly occupy a place in the lives of families and couples. But this does not always have the same effects. Are they being listened to? And in this case “How and why”. At times the story or stories fill a void, at times they offer a possibility of openness, at other times they claim to explain the present with tools that are useless. There are stories that are placed as a museum piece, others that are created from the present and others that allow to think … something … it will be necessary to know what this something has to see with everyday life. It will be a matter of thinking of what temporality we are talking about.
Key words: the present – temporalities – explain
Daniela Lucarelli & Gabriela Tavazza (Italie)
Couple links and the ideological and shared use of cultural traits
Starting from the assumption that there are correspondences between cultural traits, the metapsychic space of intersubjective links, and aspects of the individual’s psychic space, and from the consideration that psychic suffering is the effect of these correspondences, the authors discuss these considerations with the help of clinical material from the treatment of a marital couple in their early seventies. In their youth these two persons had embraced together the principles of the protests of 1968, rejecting traditional values and institutions, sharing community values and a sympathetic attitude, and supporting freedom from traditional values, the sexual revolution and emancipation from family ethics. An ideological acceptance of that way of thinking seems to have spurred the psychotic parts of their personality that were expressed as attacks to the link, acting outs, splitting and denial. The course of the treatment shows how these psychotic parts were expressed in the shared psychic reality of this couple without the possibility of being thought or transformed.
Keywords: Culture, Intersubjective suffering, Ideological system, Psychotic parts of personality
Plenary session 2 : History in the world
Sonia KLEIMAN (Argentine)
Time in motion. Family history. Event
In this work, questions will be raised regarding the emotional experiences in links, which are put into play in a historical narrative, in the scenes that are presented in the links therapy.
Although the scenes unfold in heterogeneous times, the ussual associations tend to build a chain of continuities which searches for causes and effects in the past from a historical time line.
This logic tries to avoid the discontinuity, which is expressed in the production of the linking scene, in that unprecedented situation, in that clash of bodies that is occurring.
Among the multiplicity of signals that are expressed in a scene, it is proposed to take into consideration a transience, which challenges and raises the impossibility of a straight discourse and determined meanings that look for closure points. That transience does not invalidate the historical narrative. It puts a stop on the causal timeline explanation of the situation, and highlights the experience of its occurrence instead. That is the time in movement, which is transited by mapping it.
Maria Lucia DE SOUZA CAMPOS PAIVA (Brésil)
Migration, psychic suffering and cultural differences
Migration movements are part of human history. Today, migration is vital in many political debates due to the sociopolitical impacts it has caused. In recent years, migration to developed countries is seen by the Brazilian social imaginary as the object of desire of many families. The purpose of this study is to discuss the vicissitudes that the impact of the migration process causes on the constitution of family and intersubjective ties. Based on the case history of a Brazilian migrant family who moved to the United States, our objective is to discuss the psychic suffering of the family group, especially the intense suffering experienced by the children. As it is a therapeutic work in which the transcultural issue is extremely important, we intend to widen the debate and discuss topics involving the handling with these migrant families.
Keywords: couple and family psychoanalysis; immigrant family; family tie; psychic suffering; cultural differences.
Lea S. de SETTON (Panamá)
Family Therapy in the course of twenty six years of history.
The author will present a process of family therapy in the course of 26 years of their history. The family solicited to initiate treatment to process the mourning of their son A., who had committed suicide a year ago. The therapeutic Alliance allowed the analyst to be a point of reference that helped them to grow. A continuity was maintained in time, centred in the therapist. The strategy used was concurrent dynamic therapy, (Zinner, 1989), or Situational (Losso, 2018), alternating individual, family and Couple’s therapy in different periods and moments of the family life.
In the family field the unconscious alliances and the transgenerational mandates. (Losso, 1990) were observed. I consider that the Psychoanalyst has had a role equivalent to the traditional family doctor, that takes care of everyone during the years. The therapeutic process resulted as a mode of psychic family envelope, a “group skin” (Anzieu, 1993, 1996; Houzel, 1996), that offered containment and safety to the group.
The therapist functioned as a permanent reference to whom the family members could go to, in moments of crisis.
Pierre BENGHOZI (France)
The narrative neo-container in family psychoanalytical therapy and of couple
From the work of groupale co-musing , day-dreaming in session, the narrative neo-container assures the family and community unraveled containing a function of alternative propping up, neo-container of the psychic transformations. With the prospect of Ricoeur of “a narrative identity “, the narrative process is a co-construction inter-transsubjective by the group of members of the family and therapists. The géo-narrative fresco stages a neo-epic, fanciful history from pieces of realities saturated by silences and by unavowable of the family “tinkered” ( Lévy Strauss), with fictional narrative figures.
The neo-narrative can be verbal and not verbal, in hollow, in pact of imprints, palimpsest, heir of the fragments of the transgenerational transmission of the negative, and in particular the transmission of the unconscious family not elaborate shame. It supposes a counter-transference posture of welcome available on the topical space of the preconscious groupal in psychoanalytical therapy of couple and family.
Keywords : neo-container, co-musing , Propping up, remeshing of the links, the emergence
Speeches of 27 july 2018
ROUND TABLE B1 : Links, family and couple
Irma MOROSINI, Ezequiel A. JAROSLAVSKY, Lucia BALELLO & Fiorenza MILANO (AIPCF, Buenos Aires/Milan)
Working Group: Conceptual delineation of the link, the object relationship and intersubjectivity
The link is the concept prínceps of family and couple psychoanalysis, as well as of the different link configurations: the mother / baby bond, the therapeutic and institutional group links, and the fraternal ones, etc.
Therefor it is necessary to specify and delimit its relevancy in the theoretical field of Psychoanalysis. The contributions of Bion, Bernard and Kaës, among others, will be taken into account.
We specify the unconscious psychic reality of the link produced by the group of its members; the linking psychic apparatus that determines it, and the specific formations of the link (unconscious alliances, linking dreams, foric functions, etc.).
With regard to the object relation, we will study this concept in the Kleinian perspective and establish its differences with the link.
We will also develop the historical origin of the concept of Intersubjectivity and its theories. There are different conceptions of intersubjectivity as the descriptive aspect (Brusset), Kaës’ original contribution to the metapsychology of intersubjectivity and the dynamic structure of the psychic space that is created between two or more objects (intersubjective space with its specific formations). We will also develop, from a critical perspective, the American intersubjectivity (history of the concept and its developments in North American psychoanalysis) (H. Tessier).
Keywords: Link – Object relationship – Intersubjectivity – Intersubjective space – Psychic reality of the link – Link configurations.
Liliana ÁLVAREZ, Beatriz BURSTEIN, Susana CASAURANG, Manuel LISS & Nilda NEVES (Universidad UCES, Argentina)
A family with History: legacy, secret, tragedy
We will reflect on a family’s development over three generations, in which the disintegration of family bonds threatens the social, political, economic and emotional condition of all family members.
Arising from the analysis of the film “Io sono l´amore”, we will focus on the type of bonds that results in a family functioning traversed by secrecy, migration and a form of rule exercised in a despotic manner.
Unique aspects linked to identity, ideals, love and desire are tinged with a masked and embellished primitive logic, which overshadows conflicts that remain dormant and toxically stagnant.
Stories, traditions and social context lose their value as heritage, when left to be transformed in elements of family catastrophe that has been built from the perversion of their bonds.
Key words: historical social context – migrations – traumas – secrets – toxic bonds
Célia VAZ (Université Catholique de Lyon, France)
How the tierce is carried out for a lesbian couple ?
This intervention attempts to show the adventure of a lesbian couple to building a family. We wonder about what motivates the choice of building a family despite injuries experienced by previous generations and which continue to act. In addition, the fantasy of self-generating by this biological mother is accentuated by having a child via medically assisted procreation. We will see how becoming a mother is accompanied by a desire to feed a symmetrical relationship with her child. This desire may inhibit the desire to regain his place of lover within the couple. This desire is becoming conscious parallel to the development of her son. This process is fed in part on the difficulty of the social mother to adopt the child. The third place remains vacant, waiting to be occupied. We will see how this biological mother is built in seeking supports and by identifying other women’s and maternal figures than that of his wife.
Keywords : Same sex parenthood – MAP – family line – Adoption – Third party
Carles PEREZ-TESTOR, Cristina NOFUENTES, Maria Rosa COCA, Eva de QUADRAS, Myriam PALAU & Josep MERCADAL (Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, España)
New classification of couple disorders: a proposal
Since psychoanalysis became interested in couple conflicts, there has been a doubt about if a classification were necessary. In 1956 Bela Mittelman provided a very interesting diagnostic description and shortly thereafter, in 1958, Winch did the same. Henry Dicks described in 1967 different types of collusion that were also picked up by Guillermo Teruel (1970) as a possible diagnostic classification and Jürg Willi or ourselves (Perez-Testor, 2006) dared to propose a diagnostic classification of collusions.
After the publication of the work of Robert Mendelsohn in 2009 in which he makes interesting contributions, we have reviewed our classification and we want to share the result by presenting a new classification more precise and operative.
Keywords: Collusion, Classification of Couple Disorders
ROUND TABLE B2 : New forms of parental set ups: same sex parenting, blended families, adoption
Cristina RIBEIRO DANTAS, Rebeca NONATO MACHADO & Terezinha FERES-CARNEIRO (Université PUC-Rio, Brésil)
Stepmother – stepchild – mother triad: reflections on remarriage
The remarriage emerges as a significant representative of the changes in the family, allowing the creation of new affective bonds, allowing the exercise of parenthood to be shared by several adults simultaneously or consecutively. The aim of this study is to investigate the stepmother’s perception of the interaction in the stepmother-stepchild-mother triad. A qualitative research was carried out, in which 16 stepmothers of an average socioeconomic segment were interviewed. It is observed that the interaction in the triad is influenced by the process related to the elaboration of mourning from the previous separation, by the gender roles and by the stereotype of the ‘irreplaceable mother’. It is also verified that the difficulties of the ex-spouses in discriminating the conjugality from the parenting are greater when the mourning was less elaborated during the marital separation. The remarriage of the ex-spouse can be experienced as an attack on the narcissism of the subject who did not re-create his/her love life, projecting on the former partner the cause of all their suffering.
Keywords: stepmother-stepchild-mother triad; separation; remarriage; elaboration of mourning.
Roberta GORISCHNIK & Sonia KLEIMAN (Argentine)
Two moms? Two dads? How to think from the psychoanalysis the couple and the family of today life.
In this workshop we will start with a short edition of the film directed by Lisa Cholodenko in 2010 “The childrens are fine”. We will reflect upon couples´ ties and families today in order to deconstruct categories and concepts that determine our practices. The psychoanalytic theory has assigned a central place in the constitution of the psyche to the anatomical difference of the sexes . The socio-cultural discourse , at the same time, made heterosexuality to became normative. From the language, and from the bonds of family relatinships , we have nominated places and functions that acquired gender identity and were considered essential in the constitution of subjectivity.
In the exchange with the participants, many questions will be raised. Some of them maybe as follow: Are denominations, nominations and family relationships requirements of subjective production? Could theoretical conceptualizations be separated from the prescriptions of socio-cultural discourse? Is it that other linking configurations do not produce subjectivity or that the one they produce is a failed one with respect to what has been theoretically stated ?
Elizabeth PALACIOS & Alicia MONTSERRAT (Espagne)
An Approach to Families Organizations that Claim to be Given some Further Thought
We want to convey to you all our concern and main priority in our clinical work with contemporary families as well as the challenge that this work represents to us.
We think that as analysts we have an important work to do with the social dimension of the human being and the clinical interventions in diverse cultural phenomena as migrations, marginalization, wars or the struggle for the survival of psychic life under extreme conditions. The world in which we are due to living, makes it necessary for us to consider certain issues that cannot be addressed only as an evidence of an intrapsychic conflict. We are compelled to articulate along with the psychic dimension a complex anthropological one in which the economic, political and social point of view should not be turned on its side, promoting work areas of interdisciplinary characteristic.
Keywords: family psychoanalysis, inter-subjective, trans-subjective, transgenerational, social contract
ROUND TABLE B3 : Parenthood and conjugality
Anne BOISSEUIL (France)
Becoming a parent of an autistic teenager
Adolescence is an individual but also a family psychic process. The adolescent crisis of the young pubescent has an Topdown effect (Roussillon) on the parents. For an autistic child, identity remobilization uses archaic, narcissistic and Oedipal functions where sensoriality is first.
The problem of the body and its experienced is an issue to subjectify for the young but also for those around him, his family in the foreground as well as the social group. H. Suarez-Labat (2017) stresses the psychosomatic fragility of parents of autistic children when they empower psychically. We are talking about the puberty of adolescents with autism from the point of view of their families through adolescent therapies and family talk.
Is there a psychic risk to these parents? The psychic movements, fantastical of these young people can be denied or even folded on the side of an unsymbolized somatic, is it a family defensive organization? We will then discuss the psychic process of the parents of these teenagers.
Key-word : parents, autism, adolescent, body
Charlène GUEGUEN (France)
Conjugal and perinatal metamorphoses. The arrival of a first child within the couple
Access to parenthood is a disruption of the relational dynamic in a couple. The partners have to develop news status as spouses, lovers and parents. The conjugal crisis in the perinatal period thrives on personal conflicts that are repeated at the parental level and the re-activation of conscious and unconscious elements brought together at the time of the basis of the couple.
In this context, how do these psychic re-organizations of the relational dynamic between the partners contribute to the construction of the “becoming parent” and the parenting investment?
Eight heterosexual primiparas couples were involved. Semi-structured interviews (conjugal interviews and individual interviews with each partner) have been conducted with the couples, at three successive stages: at the fourth month of pregnancy, at the seventh month of pregnancy, and later, at the infant’s third month. Finally, the last step of research includes the filmed observation of a triadic interaction at a time of free play.
The results bring into focus two trend movements in couples, during the pregnancy and at the birth of their first child. On the one hand, among certain couples, we note a re-articulation of the conjugal dynamic characterizing by a re-organization of the relation. On the other hand, we identified other couples for whom the evolution of the relation indicates a disorganization, throughout an increasing gap between the couple representations of each partner and a conjugal harmony of lower quality.
In the first group, we have noted a higher quality of the parenting investment, more specifically regarding the triadic interaction. Among these couples, we highlighted the emergence of a conjugal perinatal anticipation, resulting in a parenting investment and a couple’s evolution of better quality.
Key words : Conjugal link- Parenthood – Pregnancy – Parental representations – Coparenting
Monique BRILLAUX, Caroline DAVID, Anaïs RAVIER (France)
Life threatening cradle: death anxiety and family trauma
From two clinical vignettes, we will illustrate the impact of death anxiety, when a newborn is born, on parenting and in family history.
Thus, the birth of Simon (born very prematurely) and Lola (for whom a suspicion of severe neurological disorder was evoked) created a traumatic experience that we perceive, years later, during consultations in CAMSP, the effects in the link and in the family economy. Operative parental functioning, tyranny and hyperactivation of the bond, manic mechanisms are all manifestations of the trauma experienced in parental construction and in family ties.
It will then be for us caregivers, to question ourselves on the reception of this suffering, this initial stupefaction to allow a development of the traumatic experience through the creation of a new story thus promoting a narrative of the family history and subjective appropriation.
Key words: Death anxiety – defense mechanism – trauma – parenthood – family.
ROUND TABLE B4 : Foreigner, uprooting, family recomposition
Haydée POPPER-GURASSA (France)
The encounter with a foreigner
The encounter with a foreigner involves a paradoxical movement directed to another human being. What is supposed to be different when being someone is already to be different, due to complexity of humanity? When this other being is identified to otherness, he will be excluded of the conviviality which assembles us. Nevertheless, it is precisely his quality of similarity which permits to be a spot of projections of our troubles or fears. The difficulties of this encounter appeared dramatically between members of a family, in a family therapy. An illustration will be presented. The difficulties of this therapy lead to a reflection about the conditions of a real encounter, first condition of analytical function. They questioned also the place of therapist a foreigner.
Key words: encounter – foreigner – family therapy
Maria Angélica de CAMPOS & Maria do CARMO CINTRA DE ALMEIDA PRADO (Brésil)
“One for all, all for one”: abandonment, trauma and family pact
Family eradicating of a 10-year-old girl caused abandonment experiences, added to the impossibility of entering the school system and the resulting isolation. These circumstances, with traumatic effects, had repercussions transgenerationally, promoting alienating pacts reinforced by the difficulty in terms of verbal articulation, with impasses in extra family communication and in school performance, evidenced particularly by one of the children. The family group was closed in on itself, and its loyalty allowed for ill-defined psychic limits, with rigid unconscious alliances and obstacles for the development of all, since the separation was experienced as treason. PFT began as a challenge for co-therapists, since there was great difficulty in understanding what was said, although understanding was found among family members who nonetheless wanted to be understood. The fact that one of the therapists “spoke differently” for being Portuguese became a facilitator for the treatment.
Keywords: family; trauma; transgenerationality; unconscious alliances; communication.
Beatriz MATOSO (Portugal)
Do I want to go live with my mother ?
The intention is to demonstrate how shortcomings in the exercise of parental duties, hampers the integration process of “I” and impedes the constitution of children’s subjectivity.
There are three children in the family being studied: a six-year old boy and girl and a 4 month old girl. The six-year old girl, identified as “symptom carrier” is from African descent, daughter of an ex-girlfriend of the father.
In addition to other demonstrations of family suffering the “Little Madam”, since the birth of the younger sister, has been hostile towards the stepmother, saying she wants to go and live with her mother, who she has been separated from for 5 years and who lives in Switzerland with other children.
Therapy began a year and a half ago at a rate of one session per week and has contributed towards improving and developing this family’s relationship and the capacity to think and have insight.
Key words: Parenthood, subjectivity, transgenerational, resilience, confidence.
ROUND TABLE B5 : Links mother-daughter, mother-son
Armelle CHOUPAS (Université Paris-Descartes, France)
Thelma and Louise. A mother-daughter trip on the in-between
Thelma, 40 years old and her daughter Louise, 17 come to me because Louise is going through a difficult time.
Thelma speaks “she has always supported everything but I think this time is too much for her”.
Too much, the departure of the fathers;
Too much, caught in between the two countries : Brazil and France;
Too much, caught in between the fathers : fathers and stepfathers;
Too much, the overeating of Louise, which looks like the overeating of Thelma;
Louise speaks “my mother is everything to me, she is what I love most in the world”.
Contagiousness in a sense of a greater permeability to the other is necessary in order to allow itself to be sufficiently impregnated by the affect of the other, introject it and transform it to individualize. Contagion by affect is possible through a protective failure and an identification transmission. We call “confused permeability”, these under-permeability and over-permeability that make the phenomenon of contamination possible.
Keywords : Identification – contagiousness of affects – confused permeability – transgenerational – travel
Brigitte BLANQUET (Université Catholique de Lyon, France)
“Like mother, like daughter?” The step (passage) for the IVE: an update of the originator.
Based on the situation of a teenage girl, we will shed light on the process of actualisation (of archaic experiences). We will illustrate that for this young girl, going through abortion is a way to revisit her mother’s story, to question the meaning of her origins and to get out of the ambiguity of self/ego and not-self/nonego in the sense of J. Bleger.
Ondina GRECO (Université Catholique de Milan, Italie)
Growing up without a father: the therapeutic work with the single mother and her child
In single parent families, children, abandoned by their father before or immediately after their birth, bear their mother’s surname, so showing to be connoted by an absence also at the level of their “established filiation” (Guyotat, 1980)
Often in these situations mothers, who have had to deal with the absence of their partner since the first months of their child’s life, tend to normalize the situation (not to reopen a painful wound for them?), while children try to find strategies that allow them to ask the question of who is absent and why.
During the family therapy with the dyad single mother-child, it is possible to observe the spontaneous process of symbol construction by the children, as in the presented clinical cases.
In these situations, one of the tasks of family therapy is to ease the process of symbolopoiesis, so that the question about who is absent can be posed explicitly.
Key words: single parent families, absent father, symbolic level, conflicting needs, Symbolopoiesis
ROUND TABLE B6 : Violence and filiation
Mario DE VINCENZO & Gina TROISI (France)
Love and violence. Clinic of deadly collusion.
This reflection will allow us to think about the unconscious dynamics that underlie the couple’s relationship marked by traumatic violence. Through a reading that takes into account the entanglement of the political and unconscious aspects that underpin the social bond and the bonds of couples we will explore the affects that paralyze the psychic activity of the woman who has suffered violence. Even if the clinic with women who have experienced domestic violence is not based on a therapeutic couple practice, it seems to us essential to think in terms of internal couple to understand the unconscious alliances that weld these dead bonds. We will take Piera Aulagnier’s concept of alienation and passionate relationship in order to capture the destinies of thought and the subject’s place when the clinic confronts us with death in life and love until death.
Key words: violence against women, affects, paralysis of thought, alienation.
Ricardo REY, Roberto LOSSO, Ana Packciarz LOSSO, Maria Marcela AMENTA, Maria Fernanda RIVAS, Edda RODONI, Guadalupe MORAIS, Agueda GIMENEZ, Linda G. MARACAL (APA, Argentine)
“My parents are not my parents” Family setting in a patient with a filiation delusion
The patient M is a young woman of 31 years old that produced a psychotic flight, with a filiation delusion with the affirmation that her parents are not her parents. The patient in her delusion stated that she is not argentine but uruguayanand that her parents are uruguayan terrorist killed during the military government in Uruguay. After a stance of a month in a psychiatric hospital, when she left the place decided not to take medications and she refused psychoanalytical help too. She kept on saying that “my parents are not my parents”
It was decided to start the treatment with the parent’s couple along 3 months (12 meetings). It was possible to understand that many mechanisms implicated in the family history of the father and in that of the mother, and the link between the patient and her siblings. That family intervention generated a “link mutation” inside the family, and then it was possible to start an individual psychoanalytical treatment with M, in which the remission of her delusion has been possible.
Itwas possible to work with the concept that if her parents are not her parents, that means that in certain moments the parents and the patient occupied places that remitted to the family ancestral history, both in her mother and her father families. In that way the delusion revealed a “link truth”, ignored till that moment
Key words: Filiation delusion. Family psychotherapy. Traumatic grief
Graciela V. CONSOLI (Argentine)
Confusions and secrets
This paper is based in the Freudian concepts of psychic transmission, and the crypt, transgenerational transmission, narcissistic contract, and mythopoetic function concepts are also considered.
As we know, the traumas suffered in the previous generations, which are transmitted unconsciously, affect the current generations by generating disorders that complicate their performance in everyday life, without appearing to have any relationship with them. And this is how it happens in the clinical case that will serve as an illustration.
The case is about a patient in individual psychoanalytic treatment, a man in his forties, who, without being psychotic, presented significant confusion and disorganization in his daily and work life. Upon discovering a hidden family secret, involving his paternal grandfather, it was observed that these disturbing aspects were considerably modified. This secret, which affected his filiation with his grandfather, since he was not his father´s true father, was part of his manifest difficulties
Keywords : Psychic transmission. Crypt. Transgenerational transmission. Narcissistic contract. Mythopoetic function. Clinical case.
ROUND TABLE B7 : Mourning, adoption and culture
Célia BLINI (Brésil)
Story of a forged adoption
This work is about an adoption which occurred in the third generation. It begins with the fear of the maternal grandmother that her first-born daughter, single, be pregnant by any man. In addition, she emphasized that the interest of men for women is only sexual, denying the love bond. Her strong point of view of life and the world was crucial raising her daughter. Later on, her daughter suffered from hemorrhages and it was confirmed that she will not be able to have children, furthermore, she married a sterile man. As aunt, while the parents worked, every day she took care of the baby of her only brother. She convinced her brother that she had more conditions to look after the baby, because of the practical and financial difficulties he was facing and then, she proposed the adoption of his son. Transgenerationality is observed determining this dramatic adoption.
Oliviera SIZALDA (Brésil)
Psychic inheritance. (In) compliance with the transgenerational legacy: From conquest to longing in covert depression
Portugal, a country of contrasts and cleavage, where the psychic suffering of a people is inserted. This suffering is expressed in the very high prevalence and incidence of depression, being one of the highest in Europe and this is the main cause of suicide. As a mark of Portuguese culture, fado music stands out, where destiny, nostalgia, and sacrifice are introduced, but simultaneously and paradoxically it is a people of conquests, discoveries, where irreverence assumes a preponderant singular form of performance. The interworking, the narcissistic and object bonds and their transmission ensure the establishment and maintenance of the family group, which is repeated and perpetuates in the object choices of the subject and links it to the generational chain. What psychical heritage underlies this psychic experience? What legacy is passed on and who imprisons his heirs? A historical review based on a subject’s view as subject to the group’s biopsychosocial and cultural legacies.
Key words : Depression, transgenerationality, psychic inheritance, identity mark
Bruno LE CLEF (Belgique)
A neo-family : anthropological rupture and reproduction of lack of mournings in family groups by medically assisted procreation (MAP)
Medically assisted procreation techniques serve to calm the suffering of adults who wish to become parents and who fail to achieve such a desire. These techniques revolutionize kinship systems to varying degrees and by this fact, shake the History. The approached clinical situation will plunge us into the arrangement of the transgenerational family sufferings of the partners. Those sufferings follow traumatic mourning who produced mechanisms of rupture. We shall see that the strata which compose these bereavements and which activate the imagination can be reproduced in the reality by marrying the structure of the technique of chosen MAP. In this way, the engendered technique appears here as a paradoxical attempt to by-pass unidentified transgenerational mourning by reproducing their old nature. The petrification of the unthinkable is therefore invited in the history of our sessions …
Keywords : Neo-family, Medically assisted procreation (MAP), Traumatic mourning, Anthropology, Kinship system
ROUND TABLE B8 : Fraternal ties
Andrea SEIXAS MAGALHAES, Terezinha FERES-CARNEIRO & Rebeca NONATO-MACHADO (Université PUC-Rio, Brésil)
The power of fraternal ties in the face of social violence
Fraternal ties have been increasingly significant in situations of socio-economic precariousness, especially in contexts of social violence. In the clinic with poor families, facing the fragility of the family support network, the investment in the elaboration of psychic contents related to fraternal ties has represented an important way for the establishment of a family network. In the present work, we reflect on the power of fraternal ties in the face of social violence in the clinic with families. From the clinical material of a family that was seen in the Applied Psychology Service (SPA) of PUC-Rio, we made reflections on the place of the phratry in the psychotherapy of families in a context of precariousness and social violence. The family in question, consisting of a mother and four children, three girls (13 years, 10 years and 9 years old) and one boy (7 years old), experienced traumatic situations during a police intervention in a slum in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Keywords: phratry, violence, a clinic with families, trauma, social precariousness.
Grégoire THIBOUVILLE (Université Paris 13, France/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Fraternal violence, Cultural psychotherapy of two Melanesian brothers
It is to share a cultural psychotherapy experience of two Melanesian brothers. The therapist, in allogeneic position, receives fraternal violence during weekly one-hour sessions. The brothers endanger themselves in a destructiveness threatening their mutual narcissistic construction. They undermine the institution of child protection that welcomes them. Thus the team mobilizes the psychologist to work with them in a cultural gap. This enables these brothers to end their rivalry even their fratricide desire.By contributions from group psychanalysis and thanks to the work of René Kaës on The fraternel complex (2007), it is proposed to discuss a “broader” fraternal complex.So reveals the way to (re) create a family and generational history in a unique ethnocultural background in New Caledonia .Keywords: Fraternal violence – Melanesia – Group psychoanalysis – Cultures – “broader” fraternal complex
Maria Luiza DIAS GARCIA (Brésil)
A room, three children and haunted childhood
This work deals with the elaboration of mourning in the intra, inter and transpsychic dimensions of a family, whose mother suffered for the loss of two daughters in the first marriage. The son of the second marriage (4 years old) presented a development language delay, considered as autistic, although being a very active, sociable and communicative child. Conflicted, this mother entered her second marriage bearing pains and memories of the sickness and death of her daughters, allocating the son in the room of the deceased girls. Technical aspects will be discussed, with emphasis on transference and countertransference movements and the use of mediation techniques. Writing and music functioned as ways of expression, allowing the revival of poorly elaborated traumatic scenes and their re-signification. Consequently, the boy began to verbalize words, and then sentences. It is concluded that elaborating previous grievances is of fundamental importance to favor new bonds.
Keywords : Grief, trauma, conjugality, mediation, management.
ROUND TABLE B9 : Adoption, parentification and family communication
Renata MELLO, Terezinha FERES-CARNEIRO & Andrea SEIXAS MAGLHAES (Université PUC-Rio, Brésil)
The parentified child and his family: a dialogue between Ferenczi and Boszormenyi-Nagy
In our clinical experience, we have often encountered processes of parent-child role inversion in the family, through which children adopt a parental attitude towards the important adults in their lives. In the present work, we intend to discuss clinical practice with the parentified child and his/her family, based on the work of two Hungarian authors: the psychoanalyst Sàndor Ferenczi and the family psychotherapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy. From the first, we examine the notions of ‘wise baby’ and a disclaimer; the second, parentification and recognition. We consider that the articulation of the intrapsychic and intersubjective dimension builds a possibility of listening to the analyst in session capable of responding to the complexity of the clinic with families. To enrich the discussion of this problem, we present a clinical vignette. From the contribution of the reference authors, we find that one of the objectives of the analyst’s work with the parentified child and his/her family is the restoration of the bonds of trust in the family environment.
Keywords: wise baby; disclaimer; parentification; recognition; trust.
Elena BONASSI (Italie)
Ancient stories and new games. Family psychotherapy in a case of severe school and social phobia.
A 12-year-old boy withdraws from the school and the life and goes to the psychiatric DH of the NPI of the University of Turin. I respond to the request for help by proposing not an individual therapy but the psychotherapy of the family that brings on the scene the ancient and common roots of the malaise and their re-edition in the sessions. As will be seen from the extensive exposition of clinical material, this new experience worked through in the dynamics of transference and countertransference reopens the games and creates the possibility of writing a new story.
Key words: family psychotherapy, transference, countertransference, temporality
Josep MERCADAL, Ines ARAMBURU & Carles PEREZ-TESTOR (Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, España)
Openness family communication and psychological adjustment as predictors of secure attachment of internationally adopted adolescents
Aim: This research aimed to study the importance of attachment in internationally adopted adolescents. We consider that secure attachment is the best guarantee for the proper emotional development and the main goal that parents would have to get their adopted children, as this will allow the adolescents to create their identity with more security before entering adulthood. So we think that both openness family communication and psychological adjustment correlate with a secure attachment with the mother, father and peers. Method: Participants: 52 internationally adopted adolescents, 24 boys (age M = 14.16, SD = 1.3) and 28 girls (age M = 14.14, SD = 1.6), and their respective parents agreed to participate voluntarily in this study. Instruments: 1. Adoptive parent interview; 2. Inventory of Parents and Peers Attachment (IPPA); 3. Adoption Communication Scale (ACS); 4. Youth-Self Report Qüestionaire (YSR).
Results: ANOVAs was calculated between each pair of variables potentially predictive. Thus, it was checked if there were differences between the attachment (secure, avoidant or ambivalent) of each of the significant figures (mother, father and peers) with family communication, and communication with the father and with the mother, and overall psychological adjustment (total problems), internalizing and externalizing problems. We also carried out a regression analysis for the mother, father and peers attachment style separately. First, we introduced individually the predictor variables “psychological adjustment” and “family communication” to carry out a binary logistic regression.
Conclusions: Concerning our first hypothesis that there would be differences between psychological adjustment and secure attachment with mother, father and peers, we have confirmed that as less total problems (YSR), the attachment is secure with mother, father and peers. About openness family communication, we also confirmed that openness family communication is significantly related to a secure attachment with mother and father, and not the peers. Our second hypothesis that the family openness communication and psychological adjustment were predictive of secure attachment has been fully confirmed even controlling for psychological adjustment.
Keywords: international adoption, attachment, family communication, psychological adjustment
ROUND TABLE B10 : Transgenerational between parenthood and conjugality
Claudio MARUOTTOLO & Cecilia LLORENS-HERRERA (Espagne)
The different listening in the couple and family psychotherapy. Third topology and third generation psychoanalysis
With the designation of third topography in 2013, the psychoanalysis corpus includes two useful principles within metapsychology and clinical work. The first, complex thinking, and the second, subjectivity as an anthropological-cultural space incorporated into the psyche. With the inclusion of this third topography, neuropsychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychology and psychoanalytic anthropology are inextricably integrated into the biological, psychological and social analysis of subjects in culture. Third topography integrates preexisting and current concepts of utility in the clinical work within all psychoanalytic devices.
The present study deals with the subject of the different listenings in the psychoanalytic therapy of couple and family from attachment, interfantasy and intersubjectivity therein habitus through clinical cases.
Keywords: Third topic, subjectivity, third generation and psychoanalysis of couple and family
Miri LANGE (Israël)
The unconscious dynamics of History and the family and marital stories on the crossroad between parenthood and couplehood
There are those who separate the therapeutic function of parental guidance from psychoanalytic couple therapy. In my opinion, the personal, interpersonal and intergenerational emotional baggage, nourished by History and by family and conjugal narratives, find different channel, leading to the couple’s various preoccupations – concerning both the relationships with the child / adolescent, or the distress due to their couple relations.
In this presentation, I report the story of a couple’s therapy and the theoretical and clinical approaches that guide my efforts to understand how History and family and marital stories find ways of expression in parent-child relationship as well as in couple relationship. I will demonstrate how delving into history and into family and conjugal narratives, reveals the unconscious dynamics of the encounter between parenthood and couplehood.
Key words: couple state of mind; intergenerational transmission of trauma; link; projective identification; parenthood: unconscious belief.
Flavia COSTA-STRAUCH (Brésil)
The chossing of partener troughout time
The text presents a brief history of three different movements of the constitution of couples. From patriarchy, disrupted by romanticism, to the current era, ending with a clinical vignette about a couple’s romance.
Keywords: history, choosing, marriage, love, romance.
Plenary session 3 : The therapeutic process in family and couple psychoanalysis
David SCHARFF & Jill SCHARFF (Etats-Unis)
Brief psychoanalytic intervention for a Chinese family with two young children
The authors will present a 20-minute paper describing a Chinese family treatment, conducted using a translator, to illustrate dynamic movement in 5 sessions. The presenting patient is the 10-year-old boy with obsessional rituals, hesitations, and excessive salivation. Unusual for China, this family has a second child, a little girl. The family complains of school stress, a depressed and angry mother, a preoccupied overworked father, a critical grandmother, conflict over nutrition and sleeping arrangements, and a heavy family atmosphere. Couple and family sessions show the boy enacting the parents’ conflict, the previous generation’s impact on the couple relationship and its effect on the children, the co-therapist teamwork, the use of imagery, and the technique of play therapy (including the Squiggle game) in the family context. Eventually the play reveals an underlying confusion over identity and privilege and a family transference to the American therapists.
Roberto LOSSO, Ana Packciarz LOSSO & Anabella Sosa de BOSTRELLA (Argentine)
The “situational frame” in family psychoanalysis
In the contemporary practice of family and couple psychoanalysis, we are increasingly finding ourselves with family organizations that are not traditional ones. Consultation of “new families” (or “assembled” families) or of families in the process of divorce is particularly frequent, as well as – less frequently – that of single-parent families and families formed around homosexual couples.
We rely on the ideas of Pichón Rivière, who in his classes affirmed “the frame we take with us”. We are adapting the frame to the situations that arise at each moment of the therapeutic process. Thus, and according to the needs of the process, we work with the whole family group, with subgroups (couples of parents, parents with their new partners, groups of children, subgroups of children with one or the other of the parents, etc.). “situational frame.” We consider that this frame allows a better adaptation to the needs of the process at all times, and it also shows how variations in the framing can sometimes have an interpretative meaning. It will be illustrated by the clinical case of a family with parents in the process of divorce.
Key words: Family, divorce, new families, frame, situational frame
Timothy KEOGH & Cynthia GREGORY-ROBERTS (Australie)
Can a short-term psychoanalytic intervention with a couple be helpful?
This paper describes a proposed short-term psychoanalytic intervention and associated evaluation, designed for couples experiencing Complicated Grief. This model has been developed by Penthos, a recently established psychoanalytically oriented charity for couples and families in Australia. The paper refers to the Third Edition of the Open-Door Review (2016) which once again provided extensive evidence of the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment in both its long and short-term forms, with conditions ranging from depression to challenging personality disorders. It is noted that there are a number of models of short term interventions which have been utilized in the treatment of individuals including Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy, which has achieved recognition by the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K., resulting in wider public availability of psychoanalytic treatment. Like many short-term treatments this approach includes a central focus on transference and counter transference and relatedly the unconscious. In this paper, the authors point to the potential benefits as well as challenges, inherent in offering such a short intervention through a charitable organization and invite discussion about these issues from experienced clinicians at a round table discussion.
Key words: short-term intervention, Complicated Grief, couples, families, evaluation.
Mary MORGAN (Angleterre)
Intimate relating: love and hate in the present, past and future
This presentation explores the juxtaposition of love and hate in intimate relationships, addressing our narcissism and difficulty in being with an ‘other’, our (mis)understanding of each other, the disillusionment we encounter and the need for separateness as part of intimacy. Managing the hate that is part of love is challenging in all relationships. In some relationships hate goes underground and has an insidious impact on the relationship. However, if the relationship develops and is able to function well, conflictual internal relationships from the past, present in the internal world of each partner can be reworked. Furthermore, if the couple can contain hate within the context of love, they can engage with their differences thereby developing a future relationship that is creative. The establishment of a creative couple relationship inside each partner, acts as a resource for them each individually and as a couple.
Key words: Love, hate, past present and future
Speeches of 28 July 2018
ROUND TABLE C1 : Specificities of the multifamily device
Norberto MASCARO & Andrés MASCARO (Espagne)
From Family Psychoanalysis to Multifamily Psychoanalysis Group
The title contains the idea of a path travelled. The family dimension of psychoanalysis is found in the thought of S. Freud. In fact, the psychoanalytic study of the family allowed to go into detail the genesis and the therapeutic of the severe mental illness.
The rise of disciplines tha deal with the environment of the human being and its culture allowed to study large groups. The practice of Multifamily Psychoanalysis Groups was the consequence of this development.
The Multifamily Psychoanalysis Group represents a “mini society” that offers an ample “fiel of action” where different family models are faced and inter and transgenerational conflicts that sustain “pathogenic interdependencies” are addressed. We also deal with the multiple dispersed transference and the different mental dimensions that allow us to approach the evolution of the individual in a triple mental spaces: individual, family and social.
Keywords: Mulfamily Psychoanalisis Group, mini society and pathogenic interdependencies.
Claudio MARUOTTOLO, Josean FERNANDEZ & Cecilia LLORENS-HERRERA
The process of identification and differentiation in multi-family psychoanalysis. Similarities and differences with the psychotherapies of couple and family.
Identification is recognized in psychoanalysis as a central mechanism in the understanding of the psyche, from the psychosexual development and adoptions of social practices in the culture of belonging, to symptom formation. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy the use of these complex linking operations are necessary to provide the conditions for psychic change.
From the perspective of the multi-family psychoanalysis group (MFPG), the process of identification and differentiation, during psychotherapy between families, will be essential in the acquisition of new genuine ego-related resources.
In the present work we will deal specifically with the acquisition of role identity in couples and families that participate in the MFPG and its relationship with the process of identification and differentiation. We will establish similarities and differences with couple and nuclear family psychotherapies through the analysis of a clinical case.
Keywords: MFPG; identification; differentiation; role identity
Florencio MONEO (Espagne)
Multifamily Psychoanalysis. A delinquency story.
(Room Full. All on chairs. 43 participants. Silence. Psychotherapist 1 closes the door. It all goes completely silent. The participants are sitting on chairs in 2 concentric circles).
– Can we start? Can we speak?
-Yes
-Yes, yes, the door has been closed.
– I wanted to say that I feel very bad. Yesterday it was two years since my father died. I feel really bad. Because he hurt me a lot. On the one hand I felt relief because he had died. On the other hand, I would have liked to make up with him. To have been with him on the day he died. But I didn’t do it. I feel really bad. And now I can’t let go of that idea. I am a person who gets hurt … And I hate myself twenty-four hours a day.
Keywords : Psychoanalysis, multi-family, delinquency, technique, new thinking.
Nicolas RABAIN (France)
Multi-family psychoanalysis and family romances of the adolescent
Multi-family psychoanalysis, which consists in gathering several patients and their parents together with co-therapists, is barely known in France. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the promotion of this original therapeutic approach for adolescents. Indeed, this kind of therapy contributes to the various operations leading to parental objects’ decathexis, paradoxically in their very presence. Using the inter- and transgenerational material and the play of identifications among participants, we point out how multi-family gatherings reinforce the ability to associate, to relaunch conflictuality and redeploy libido onto objects of substitution. Our contribution aims in fine at promoting the psychoanalytic approach of the multi-family therapies, which is also inspired by the systemic approach.
Keywords: Adolescence – Conflict – Elaboration – Intergenerational – Multi-family psychoanalysis.
Alberto TREYSSAC (Argentine)
The multifamily meetings as supportive networks
The author exposes his experience coordinating a Home with a Day Center for teenage and adult patients with mental disabilities. He describes the daily difficulties that arise at the institutional levels and with the groups of patients, as well as with the groups of assistants, professionals, teachers, and essentially with families. Many of these difficulties related to deaths, neglects, accusations among members of the family generated the need to create a device that was therapeutically effective in working with them. This is how the multifamily meetings emerged, in which the themes of both the families and the institution are worked on together. A family history is created inside other stories, reviewing and strengthening the networks of support, by means of a feeling of belonging.
Keywords: Mental disability – Hospitalization – Multifamily meetings – networks of support – Feeling of belonging
ROUND TABLE C2 : Institution, subject and genealogy
Maurice BERGER (France)
The psychoanalytic history of a therapeutic institution
Every human being belongs to a group might it be a family, cultural, institutional or else group. And every institution has an history. We are planning here to go over the history of a therapeutic institution specialized in treating, intra muros, extremely violent children and their family. This history was marked by a conceptual revolution: at the onset, the psychoanalytic project was an intensive psychotherapy, five times a week, to help the patients to alter their intrapsychic representations, but it failed; the pluridisciplinary team had to come up with very containing arrangements calling for diverse parental functions to help these youngsters to start thinking. The psychoanalyst, head of the department, had to keep in mind the concept of “task to do” (Kernberg), to be involved as a concerned witness of the team’s experience without feeling sorry for them, and to be the memory of the institutional history. Only a constant reflective thinking can keep up among the professionals the cement build by the pleasure of co-creativity.
Keywords: co-creatitvity, psychological holding, childhood, therapeutic institution, violence.
Ruth LEVISKY (Brésil)
Labyrinths of stories in life and in the clinic.
The burden of the trans-generations inheritances imposes itself and are imposed across generations. Mutations which occur in the clinic and in the society lead the analyst to create a maze of mental configurations in order to seize and interpret the different family dynamics. These transformations are the result of the intertwining of complex reconfigurations of life histories. The author analyzes the different technical paths in the course of the analysis of a family and their anguishes in the face of the unusual. This work aims to promote the discussion on: 1.The importance of the stories and the legacies in the formation of the subject and the subjectivity; 2. How the stories are reported and how they are heard and felt by the psychoanalyst and the family; 3. The mental flexibility and creativity of the analyst to expand new work frames. 4. Which families are we talking about? 5. Changes in the configurations and processes of oedipal elaboration, narcissistic structuring and the fraternal conflicts, present in the transfer -counter-transfer relationship.
Keywords: technical variants; stories and legacies; creativity of the analyst; Oedipus; narcissism.
Muriel KATZ-GILBERT & Giuseppe LO PICCOLO (Suisse)
The free realization of the family tree: a projective mediation at the service of the work of historicization
The free realization of the family tree is a useful projective mediation in the study of psychic transmission between generations. Our communication aims to show the relevance of such a tool in the clinical encounter to explore the content of the primal phantasies in subjects suffering from collective violence. Considered as a genealogical crime, the extermination of a people makes filiation their privileged target. How, then, do survivors of the Shoah fantasmatically fit into their genealogy? What are the possible traces of trauma revealed by the meeting mediated by the free realization of the family tree? Through this work, we aim to show how a mass crime such as genocide has psychic repercussions on several generations, which can be considered a disaster of filiation. But also how the mediating and projective dimension of the device allows the process of historicization and remembrance of family and collective history in a descendant of a Holocaust survivor.
Keywords: free realization of the family tree, psychic transmission, primal phantasies, projective mediation, genocide
ROUND TABLE C3 : The junction of temporal dimensions : past, present and future
Gemma TRAPANESE & Santa PARRELLO (Italie)
Terror coming from the future
Through the presentation of a clinical case of a multiproblematic family, followed in cotherapy, the authors propose an exploration of the rich phantasizing occupying the field of the family psychoanalytical setting. The case questions about some modalities of transgenerational transmission of mental pain. The intercrossing between intrapsychic, interpsychic and transpsychic is made accessible from the interactions in the here and now of the session. The family is composed by parents and two daughters, 5 and 9 years old. The couple asks for help for the anxious and seemingly inexplicable screaming of the youngest daughter. The group psychic apparatus, activated by the family setting, has made recognizable the collusive pact of the couple and a precise initial system of interpersonal defenses, characterized by the transport of psychic pain and dominated by colonizations and alienating identifications. The attention to the transference-countertransference movements has made it possible to read an initial process of transformation tending to restore the generational order and to reactivate hope.
Keywords: Multiproblematic family, transgenerational transmission, death, alienating identifications, collusive pact.
Caroline SEHON (Etats-Unis)
Individual analysis and family therapy
This case discussion will explore the benefits of using a family therapy model in which an individual child analysis is conducted concurrently with parent work, by the same clinician. This psychoanalyst will discuss the rationale for designing this treatment strategy for this particular family. This study will provide vignettes from the child therapy and the parent sessions. Transference and countertransference elements will be discussed, with particular reference to exploring how the integration of these elements, in these separate but interrelated treatment contexts, can provide an enriched lens through which to consider treatment of the family as a whole. The case relates to link theory and analytic field concepts through an explication of the intergenerational and professional network implications of
Penelope JOOLS (Autralie)
A model for the emotional development of couples: how does narcissistic relating fit in?
The author interrogates the usefulness of a developmental model, particularly in regard to narcissistic relating in couples. How do we deal with the lack of “negative capability” in a couple whose game is to control each other? How do we deal with our own narcissistic injury in a couple’s failure to use the therapeutic intervention in a way that promotes their emotional growth?
The author is part of an Australian organization that works psychotherapeutically with couples and families. (CAFPAA) Over time the group has developed a model, building on the work of Klein, Bion and Fairbairn that helps to understand a family or couple’s emotional development. (Jools, Berg & Byrne, 2018, Keogh & Enfield, 2013). The model also suggests therapeutic techniques that might be most helpful to engage the couple or family in reflecting on their difficulties in a manner that promotes the capacity for curiosity about the mind of the intimate other.
Keywords: The work of the analyst: technical differences and “superimposed worlds”.
ROUND TABLE C4 : Research Methods: Group, Institution and Family
VIDEOR 5 : Moreno GAUDENZI, Cristina BERTOGNA, Gigliola TESSARI, Michele TREVISANATO, Rodolfo PICCIULIN (Italie)
Research method on dreams groups
The contents of dreams are absolutely the real ones of team members composed by Cristina Bertogna, Gigliola Tessari, Michele Trevisanato, Rudy Picciulin, Moreno Gaudenzi, and images are an evocative invitation to reflect on some themes in an open work in progress, as our research job. The team met up seven times in meetings of five Hours. The topic that we have chosen and called was psychoanalisys and groups with reference to new objects in scientific field; this topic has become dream and emerging of a research team following the Operative Conception of Group reflecting on theorethical and clinic practices in groups. The dream structure appears as a “model” to reflect in groups, because it leads us to adopt different perspectives on reality, all structurally valid. In this sense, dream becomes an emerging of the group process when setting up a pattern of present group relationships. At the beginning of this experience the ideas about tasks of every single participant found their expression in the image of a fog that softens and thickens in an anonymous landscape, an anybody and nobody’s land. The group containment offered an enlarged hospitality capable to host the most archaic levels of our minds offering us the possibility to listen and dream what was happening. We survived over almost two Earthquakes, several absences and we felt the necessity to build up something: te-build the ancient of create something else? And where to build it? Near the native place? We distinguished a scenery of a migrant community, collapsed institutions and broken identities. How to start a restoration process? Where and with whom? As a research team, assuming a task linked to an operative conception creates an Earthquake, put in a mess the interal group and institutions. The research, the way to follow, obliges us to free ourselves of unnecessary things, to find out the most suitable tools in a theoretical home. Armando Bauleo said:”the task should give identity to the group, because let the members “un-frame”, removing their masks that strengthen their conventional behaviours”. The teamwork situation has let us “dream the Dreams” as an hidden access, an immaginary that was built in the bond group-task; the dream as an emerging draw the attention in the dynamic evident/hidden of the team structure. It’s in the research nature that the emerging is in a dialectic relationship between cinceptualization, practice and personal engagement. We should hold different knowledges and connection schemes, with some frustration, to let all five internal groups to fight meet and enlarge themselves. Dreams have been represented also as condensed demonstration of aspects of the task. Moreover we have suffered an own “physical- somatic attendance” of anyone of us, to develop toughts; the Emergents need a certain development timeframe before moving to their understanding that is the objective of interpretation. Permutation is related to the possibility of a caleidoscopic overview capable to enunciate sensoriality and Dreams, individual and groups, evident and hidden, old and New theories, before and after Armando. We can assume that transformation in groups is the moment where the individual emerge or: When the Group is in the task, individual emerge. Transformations happen after a sorrow, starting again from questions, contrasts and advance of our teachers and Pioneers that provided continuous efforts to conceptualize their clinic remarks. Heritage is in the METHOD.
Alberto KONICHECKIS, Silvia ZORNIG & Fernanda RIBEIRO PALERMO (Université Rio et Paris Descartes, Brésil/France)
Esther Bick Case Study
A case study will be presented with a family, whose triplets, Lia, Fernando and Joaquim, were conceived through a reproductive health care treatment. This is a longitudinal research, which was conducted according to Esther Bick’s (1964) observation method during the first year of the children’s lives. The data in this analysis allow us to reveal a number of aspects that make up the family, how the formation of the parental couple and the creation of an environmental relational tissue. They also make it possible to make the transmission patterns between generations clear and to identify how they are found in each member of the family. Then, after a presentation of some conceptual elements about parenthood, psychic transmission and affiliation, the case will be presented in order to illustrate these concepts and make the discussion richer.
Key words: generational transmissions, affiliation, baby observation, assisted medical procreation, triplets.
Manuela PORTO , Lúcia ABRANTES, Sérgio BOÍNHO, Pedro MARTINS, João Paulo RIBEIRO, Maria João VENCESLAU (Portugal)
How does the meta-setting influence the therapeutic setting in institutions? Some institutions in Portugal.
By meta-setting we mean the set of conditions and circumstances belonging to an institution itself, including its own history and aspects of generational transmission, which influence the creation and development of the therapeutic setting. But we also need to analyze larger environments, with repercussions on the life of institutions and the therapeutic setting itself. Let us, for reasons of operability, designate as ‘macro-setting’ the one constituted by other circumstances, namely of public policies.
In Portugal there has been a progressive disinvestment on the longest and profound psychological interventions; the dynamic approach is increasingly disappearing from the Public Services and from some private institutions and has been replaced by a more biological perspective. Simultaneously, there has been increasing pressure from public administration to cover the population mental health needs, without the reinforcement of human resources or inter–agency work.
All these issues are reflected in the institutional dynamics, both on the patient, on the therapist and the teams.
_What is the extend and quality of this impact, which is felt as a form of violence and attack on a humanized relationship, on therapists and their patients?
_Which are the effects on “ interphantasmatization”, and on transference-countertransferential processes?
Keywords: institution, setting, meta-setting, violence, transference-countertransference
ROUND TABLE C5 : Plural approach in couples psychoanalysis
Barbara BIANCHINI (Italie)
The model of the analytic field in the development of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy
In this paper I attempt to highlight how one of the aims of our analytic work with couples is to enhance the capacity to tolerate and metabolise uncontainable and disturbing thoughts and feelings that may be generated by the couple relationship. To this end, I believe that the model of the analytic field, as developed by A. Ferro and the Pavia school, provides a useful opportunity to promote the development of instruments for thinking together, and to promote the weaving of new narratives, co-constructed between the analyst and the partners in the couple. The couple session becomes a dream of minds, where different stories from different times and loci of the field come together, overlap, and become intertwined. The shared experience derives from allowing the free flow in the session of emotional states, affects, thoughts and characters. The analyst (who is also a place in the field) guarantees and safeguards the setting and promotes creative activity by re-orientating the sense impression and meaning of the relationship.
Keywords: couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, analytic field, development of instrument for thinking
Judith Christine PICKERING (Australie)
Transformations in “O in Love”: an application of Bion’s thinking to the couple.
This paper takes the life-story of Bion to frame how his theories developed out of his own history and autobiography. It then applies the clinical thinking of Bion to the area of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with couples. It argues that Bion’s concept of O is a relational one and that we become who we are through our relationships. Yet numerous psychological obstacles obstruct such realization, in particular, that pertaining to unresolved relational traumata and loss from our family histories, including the intergenerational domain. Through unconscious processes of mutual projective identifications, each partner unwittingly conscripts the other to play a part in the repetition of old stories, creating an entangled interlocking traumatic scene which hijacks the relationship, preventing true intimacy from flourishing. Illustrated with clinical material, this paper charts the difficult psychological terrain leading towards becoming O in and through love.
Keywords: interlocking traumatic scenes, Conjoint selected fact, O.
Schlomit BEN LAVY (Israël)
Multiple losses in a couple : Are we siblings? A couple ?
When children who grow up in the same extended family household become a couple, do they share a similar narrative? Or does each experience a different life and different parenting? How will their couple narrative and patterns of relating look like and what will be their challenges and difficulties? I will address these issues through the case presentation of Gill and Debby, a religious Jewish couple in their forties, who live in a traditional village in Israel, surrounded by their extended family. They have been married for 22 years and have 2 children. Their grandfathers were brothers and their grandmothers were sisters. They grew up together in the same extended family household since early childhood, following the tragic death of Gill’s father. They seeked therapy over a year ago after Debby’s discovery they are broke, due to gill’s gambling. Intense rage erupted exposing losses and traumas of them both.
ROUND TABLE C6 : Problemas contemporáneos del analista de pareja y familia
Souad BEN HAMED (Tunisie/France)
Listening to the analyst and the threat of deafness in couple and family psychoanalysis
A family of artists, living in a migratory rhythm that has become habitual, marking a difficulty in investing a livable space that pushes them to multiply houses while being fantastically linked to a single house belonging to the grand-mother and grandmother family that they have never occupied outside a few periods of holidays. We will present this clinical situation while proposing various possible orientations for listening, interpretation and analysis. This will allow us to take up S. Wainrib’s very interesting question: “When a colleague presents his work to us, the interpretation of clinical material often tends to be oriented according to his membership (…). Would he only have to (…) lead the analysis in the direction of the goals set for the cure?” S. Wainrib proposes to revisit the subjectal position of the analyst who gathers several elements within it. We will study some of its elements in relation to the proposed clinical situation.
Keywords : Subject position of the psychoanalyst – Living space – Drugs – Incestuel – Narcissistic perversion
Maria DO CARMO CINTRA DE ALMEIDA PRADO (Brésil)
Sex change: beyond idealization
Two candidates for vaginoplasty showed us their readiness to commit to mutilating and irreversible surgery, without any idea of who they are or who they are, with broken or non-existent family ties, no means of subsistence and no social connection. . With regard to parents with childhood, fragmented reports of scattered facts show a relational experience frozen, without emotional or intimate parental commitment to children, although paternal aggression was present in terms of physical or mental violence. Without a record of the emotionally important facts in the childish psychic experience, painful failures with regard to primary identity are observed. Images of men and women involved are not the genitals and seek to eliminate each other, then requiring the emasculation of the man so that the woman can exist, which makes obvious the damage to psychic bisexuality. By surgery one does not seek a narcissistic identification whose desired image is used as a mirror of the self. By presenting itself as a too idealized remedy, it is seen as a solution for the existential condition or simply as a possibility of access to rather modest situations at first, like going to the beach, but in addition, there seems to be an idolized phenomenon where the surgery itself becomes a sacred fetish object.
Francesco BIONDI & Angela BARCHIELLI (Italie)
Family, absence of mentalization and acting-out
- is 24, is an only child, anger seems to pervade every aspect of his life.
He feels contempt for his father and is afraid of being “infected” by his stupidity. A recent episode worries him: because of a kick of his, the “stupid” dog of his former girl is dead.
Individual sessions, dominated by problems related with parents, suggest the need for family therapy which develops gradually, accompanied by a rich production of dreams. The individual sessions continue at the same time.
Parents have marriage difficulties and seem unable to deal with them; F. feels he must protect his mother and control his father.
Parents histories show they were not seen (mentalized) by their own parents; this has produced problems in the couple in communicating and adequately fulfilling the parental role. Through acting out and anger F. signals the impasse of his family and the effect of transgenerational elements.
Keywords: family, acting-out, mentalization, dream, transgenerational
ROUND TABLE C7 : Institutional work with families and couples
Anne-Claire DOBRZYNSKI (Université Lyon 2 Lumière, France)
Transformation of transgenerational inheritance into interinstitutional psychic scene
Through “commettage”, subjective language of delictual act, Jean, almost 16 years old, always having his backpack, convenes his mother on the scene of family exile in dictatorship context, uprooting scene, effect of political violence which she witnessed.
Into transdisciplinary clinical support in penal framework, in particular into interstitial scenes of interinstitutional scene, unconscious alienating alliances in the mother-son link move in the relationship between mother and educator. The educator expresses she feels snatched, dispossessed of her free will. In the same movement, unconscious structuring alliances emerge between Jean and educator. What could be understood as a lack of distance from the educator towards the mother and Jean is transformed into a subjective process for the teenager, thanks to the clinical work in the internal groups of this singular and plural psychic scene. Through the handling of the double function of the boundary between the intimate and the shareable, the clinician supports this transformation of the transgenerational inheritance.
Keywords : transgenerational heritage, unconscious alliances, tort drift, interinstitutional psychic scene, transdisciplinarity.
Adina ALEXANDRESCU (Roumanie)
The Hospital-Home. Working with families in a chronic illness hospital
Institutional work with families whose children have chronic illnesses, is a great challenge for both healthcare staff and support staff, including psychotherapists. So I propose a family work device in a chronic disease hospital, in the primary immunodeficiency department, with serious genetic diseases.A special issue of the department is the work with the Roma families, where consanguinity marriages often cause immunodeficiency due to genetic inheritance.
I will illustrate a clinical case of a 28-year-old young man , still treated in the pediatric section, who due to his ethnic and cultural affiliation (part of a Roma family) lives with his family a double marginalization. The 28-year-old family at the borderline between life and death and having only limited contact with the outside world is confronted with the anguish of non-acceptance and exclusion, both due to illness and ethnicity.
Keywords : Institutional work, chronic illness, family listening, cultural identity, double marginalization
Sara DONZALES DE PABLOS (Espagne)
Syria project
The Nuevo Futuro Association develops the Sirio Project, which has two Therapeutic Homes according to the Therapeutic Community model, for children and teenagers with some measure of protection and with severe link disorders. Coming from families that carry serious link failures, carriers of violence, sexual abuse and negligence. An integral treatment is carried out, with spaces for psychotherapies, including group, community, family, educational and pharmacological psychotherapies if necessary…
I will make an approach to this work that repairs and creates new links, generating transitional spaces of thinking, creativity, link and symbolic elaboration that will help them mature and confront their conflicts, through a new institutional framework and a corrective family framework, where the institutional environment is an important therapeutical mean.
The task of the Therapeutic Community team is complex and covers all the convivial, clinical, educational and social aspects; from a clinical understanding of those aspects. I will also talk about this teamwork, as a joint response to the difficulties of the patients and their families; within a conception of the group and family psychic apparatus. This allows favoring the elaboration of anxieties, both those transported by patients and those taken care of by therapists and educators, as well as the various defenses and depositions that take place within the institution’s container space.
Keywords: institution, link disorder, compulsion to repetition, violence, support, continent, transitional space, transferences, group psychic apparatus.
ROUND TABLE C8 : Exchange and inter-institutional projects IACFP IPA
This round table will be aimed at establishing scientific exchanges between the two associations (AIPPF-IPA) with the main purpose of analyzing possible joint work, to unite all our efforts to disseminate as best as possible the psychoanalysis of couple and family in the world. These exchanges and this inter-institutional association are aimed at sustaining and protecting the psychoanalytic epistemology.
Key words: AIPPF – IPA psychoanalysis – couple – family
ROUND TABLE C9 : Analyst’s work and ambiances in psychoanalytic family therapy
Christophe BITTOLO (Université Paris Descartes, France)
” The atmosphere of the sessions: a transfer of group ? “
If the atmosphere constitutes an essential quality of the relationships which the human being maintains with his architectural environment, his appearance in the therapeutic session shows most primitive and collective aspects of the psychic life. The sensitive space of the link is affected there and the analyst can be only alerted by the new and changeable qualities of the analytical site of the consultation or the therapy.
This presentation suggests specifying the syncretic nature and protomentale of the atmospheres and questioning the competences of its processing in the groups (families, teams…) What configuration of group is then transferred in there and then of the session? About what transfer is it ? Is not it more relevant to speak about interlocking or about echo ?
Keywords: Atmosphere, transféro-contre-transférentielle situation, fantastical echo, psychic interlocking
Rocío CABANZO DE PONCE DE LEON (Colombie)
Another way of perceiving, another way of thinking
Through vignettes, metaphors and haikus (poetry of immanence) we present the position of the Linking Analyst according to the perspective of contemporary thinkers (Deleuze, Simondon, Puget, Berenstein, Kleiman, Lewcowicz) and my own clinical experience.
We emphasize the following:
Thought in becoming, Rhizomatic Logic (decentering, immanence, supplementary logic, fall of binary gender).
Discontinuity, Aión, “Impresencia”
“More than the present it is about what is situational, which is combined to account for a discourse and history is within that discourse.”Kleiman, S.
History as a “Multiplicity of presents that have been” Berenstein, I.
Analogical, metaphor and humor, other logic in reading and intervention. The situational strategy, the climate.
“More from Geography than from history “… (Kleiman, S.) Alluding to immanence, cartographic version of history. It is the philosophy (geo philosophy) of Deleuze contributing to the reading of “Lo Vincular”.
Keywords: Becoming, Rhizomatic, situational, cartography, analog.
Fernanda RIBEIRO PALERMO & Maria DO CARMO CINTRA DE ALMEIDA PRADO (Brésil)
“I like blended relationships”: the costs of the yes and no in TFP with father and daughter
Issues related to anti-Oedipal families promote ill-loved relationships seen through “trans-subjectivity” and “trans-acting” in successive generations. The psychic spaces of each one are indistinct and also repeatedly transgressed. In the individual psychic elaboration, the synchronic organization of the family is inseparable from the diachronic contribution, and attention must be paid to family traumas and their effects on the generations. Father and daughter seek PFT after 10 years of mother’s death. The father says he likes “blended” relationships and the daughter continues to make inexhaustible demands on him. Evidence shows that neither he finds himself in a position to remake his life, nor does she emancipate herself. A previous non elaborated mourning guided by reactive formations bases the impossibility of separation and individuation. Pathological links are associated with incestuality, since, faced with the father’s pain of seeing himself alone, the daughter occupies the place of “sweetheart.”
Keywords: mourning; trauma; trans-subjectivity; trans-act; incestuality.
ROUND TABLE C10 : The narrative of the family history
Lucia BALELLO, Raffaele FISCHETTI & Fiorenza MILANO (Italie)
Five characters in search of a family
With the term “groupality” the authors intend, with A. Bauleo, a notion that refers to the production of subjectivity that extends to include the same subjects that produce it. In the notion of groupality the group is placed as a subject in that it produces subjectivity; the inclusion of the subjects that produce it allows us to think of the person as a collective subject.
Through a clinical case the authors want to highlight the relationship that is shown between the process of subjectivation of a family that is re-organizing and the process of subjectivation that simultaneously make the members of the family group as they enter the current situation (the neo-group). by E. Granjon), and come out from the undifferentiated lump of individual, family micro-stories and the great history (the transgenerational).
The way in which the symptom is expressed and distributed, its degree of stiffness, gives the family a certain organization that in the therapeutic process shows itself through the reorganization / differentiation of the functions, the links and the family tasks that take on a richness and a flexibility that they did not have before.
Keywords: groupality, process of subjectivation, collective subject, emerging, functions
Christiane JOUBERT & Michèle LAMOTHE (France)
Mourning and trauma in family and couple clinics
Understanding the ( individual and group) symptoms presented by the family gets inscribed into two dimensions, one synchronic, the other diachronic. From the three psychic spaces as defined by Kaës, we propose to point how bereavements and trauma in the lineages deposit and have to be elaborated in the family group. We put on work the clinics of the ties, as it spreads out in the transfer-countertransfer field. The regression allowed by the group psychoanalytic frame, leads to work on the narcissic ties that are instilled with transgenerationnal, this in order that bereavements and trauma in the lineages might be symbolized and integrated into the family history. A mythopoïesis unfolds in the psychoanalytical space, opening itself on a new history with its potential of transformation. The process of the therapy aims to come out from undifferentiated functionings (confusion between persons, sexes, generations), and to accede to to and oedipal functioning that warrants the access to individuation and subjectivation.
Key words : mythopoïesis, symptom, tie, transfero-countertransferential, transgeneraionnal
Maíra BONAFE SEI (Brésil)
Female homoparentality and adoption process: expectations and impasses
This paper discusses aspects regarding the adoption of three children by a female homoaffective couple, reflecting on issues related to generational psychic transmission and the impasses experienced in this adoption. The clinical material comes from the couple’s psychotherapy, performed in a Brazilian public service, from a referral of the judicial system. Through the psychotherapy, we noticed the updating of problems related to the adoption of one of the mothers, which influenced the choice of adoption instead of assisted reproduction. The experience of motherhood was permeated by illusory expectations, which reverberated attempt to return the eldest daughter. It is pointed out to the importance of a careful process of evaluating applicants to the adoption, as well as monitoring of families. It is concluded that a psychoanalytic view on the construction of bonds in adoptive families is fundamental.
Keywords: homoparentality, adoption, psychic transmission, couple’s psychotherapy.
ROUND TABLE C11 : Body of the subject, family body and filiation
Almudena SANAHUJA (France)
Generational trauma, its effects in the family body. Body symptom of an adolescent limb as a substitute for a non-psychic link
In the context of this intervention is the clinic of trauma, its effects on the family body that we wish to refer to. Our clinical experience and our research work carried out in recent years with families with a teenager member carries the obesity symptom, led us to reflect on the specificity of intersubjective links that structure the family. Through a paradigmatic example we will show that the adolescent “carries a symptom” present through his body ghosts and ancestral traumas. Those who made a in the family psychic apparatus, open the way to this “somatization”. Somatization replaces the non-psychic link and it is the body that connects the members. In the light of these findings, adjustments to our practice of psychoanalytic family therapy would bring renewed relevance to families with bodily symptomatology.
Rebeca NONATO MACHADO, Cristina RIBEIRO DANTAS & Renata MELLO (PUC-Rio, Brésil)
Paradigms of the filiation: the corporal dimension in the establishment of the adoptive family
We found in the literature a reflection on the fundamental elements of ties of filiation, where biological and cultural factors are present in the composition of the sense of belonging to a generational chain and insertion into a family history. In the present work, we intend to discuss the intersubjective game of corporal manifestations in the constitution of the filiation in adoptive families, from 14 semi-structured interviews with adoptive mothers. We observed that the absence of biological-corporeal continuity in the process of adoptive filiation is a present element in the intersubjective meeting of mothers and children. The corporeal dimension appears in the interviewees’ discourse with an urgent appeal for the parent-child relationship. We believe that the bodily manifestations in these families seek to organize the process of filiation in its sensorial dimension, which is responsible for the establishment of an intimate human relationship and deep communication that allows the meeting between two subjectivities.
Keywords: adoptive families, the process of filiation, intersubjective meeting, body
Sonia KLEIMAN, Soledad DAWSON, Bettina LASTER & Martina REPETTO (Groupe Hôpital Italiano, Argentine)
Investigation. Family configurations in adolescent patients with chronic renal failure
This paper focuses on the study of family configurations of adolescent patients with chronic renal failure (CRF); It will inquire what the relational emotional effects are in families with teenage children suffering CRF. The possibility that such effects could become chronic was investigated in the categories of family exchange, establishing relationships of dependence, in fixing places and roles of family members and / or the significance that the disease acquires for that grouping.
The working hypothesis statement was that it is possible to corroborate in a bidirectional between emotional effects of chronic kidney disease, in adolescent patients and the conscious and unconscious link to the family to which they belong. Family link production affects the emotional states of its component members, the medical treatment, social exchange, the vital project of the family group where this event takes place, as well as various modes of transit and possible outcomes of the disease.
Keywords: Chronic renal failure – chronic kidney disease – teen – family – intersubjectivity – emotionality
Plenary session 4 : The work of the analyst: technical differences
Rosa JAITIN (France)
Friendship, filiation and migration
I shall analyze the position of friendship in the migration as the link of anaclisis, intermediary between various filiation levels.
Friendship derives from the possibility of the family to unite the links of the erotic chains of filiation inter and transgenerational between parents, children anf brothers.
These bindings or unbindings show themselves in the deferred action of the migratory disorders and traumas, in various levels of symbolization (thrrough psychosomatic illnesses, acting out or deliriums).
In the «here and now » of the transferential field, the potentiality of the future of the family members varies according to the reasons which led to migration and the links of friendship maintained between the country of origin and the host country.
The psychoanalysis of couple and family will allow us to point out the possible transformations in the process of elaboration of the ruptures and the migratory traumas.
Keywords : Friendship, migrations, filiations, inter and transgenerational erotic chains, symbolization.
André CAREL (France)
The “Après-coup” in family session
In a session of family psychoanalysis, the setting in history, in other words the historization, is carried out according to very complex modalities. It takes shape in the flow of the multi modal co-associativity of the neo therapeutic group: emotions, words, games, actions, paths in space. It intricates narrative (or narrative) and reminiscences of the unconscious. But “the unconscious is polytopic” (René Kaës), it unfolds in the internal world of each subject, in the intersubjective links, in the current and generational groupality and also, in the background of the session, in the community. ‘membership. In each of these psychic spaces, the process of the post-coup is at work to produce the multiple reminiscences of the unconscious in the field of the encounter. The analyst’s listening and alpha function are therefore put to the test in order to regulate and put into sense a historization so prolific, “bushy”, potentially violent. This is, therefore, exposed to the risk of becoming neo traumatic, hallucinosis, excess (the toboggan of the story precipitate) or default (the “without history”). How to walk in this hyper complexity?
Keywords : Historization, after-the-fact, traumatic risk, hallucinosis.
Anna NICOLO (Italie)
Biography of the individual and biography of the family as a therapeutic tool
The author discusses the importance of the construction/reconstruction of biographical history as a tool for unconscious transformation and cohesion of the self and of family identity.
The challenge of clinical work with difficult patients consists in transforming the primitive states of the mind, where traumas are stored but cannot be thought. These kinds of memories are expressed in actions and dreams and are hidden at different levels in family links. The narrative reconstruction of all members performs different functions from work on the most primitive dimensions to work on individual and family self.
Keywords: Biography of the individual – biography of the family – narrative reconstruction – memories
Irma MOROSINI (Argentine)
The secret in the narrative of the family history. The “second scene”
The author sets out the processes that take place in the family narrative and how and when the intervention of the family analyst is required, paving the way to the transferencial field. The work is pointed through memory, by linking memories , hidings, and how “a truth” emerges in the second scene of the plot while co- building stagings by means of psychodrama techniques and resources: the Family tree and the autobiographic narration, among others. The family novel, with its transmitions, illustrates the stories in family, the ones belonging to the subjective identity as well as the ones belonging to the intersubjective identity, stories that involve the family history. In the TFP process an almost constant presence arises: the secret, generator of accomplices and hostages, which operates as the “intruder”, an “intruder” which must be evicted with the necessary precaution.
Key words: Family narrative – memory and memories – second scene – technical resources- the secret.
Plenary session 5 : The work of the analyst: technical differences
Ezéquiel Alberto JAROSLAVSKY (Argentine)
Suffer, historicize and elaborate with a couple
The mourning for the tragic death of a daughter is a difficult suffering to be elaborated by a couple of parents. This mourningl increases, if in addition, they have difficulties to be able to see, take care of and support their grandchildren. What´s more, they are in a crisis situation due to their retirement. This succession of events requires their redefinition of their life projects.
The supportive and elaborative space provided by the psychoanalytic treatment of the couple enables them to restrengthen their psychism in the transference-countertransferential space of the sessions with the analyst.
In addition, telling their respective family histories made the task of historicizing their mournings possible.
During the treatment, to relive, tell and historicize their respective family conflicted histories gain importance, as the psychic work that each one carried out with their families of origin and how they solved their mournings in the past, is useful as a model to use this experience and thus be able to work on their current sufferings.
It will be illustrated with clinical vignettes
Keywords: Mourning for the death of a daughter – Crisis of couple – Historization – Generational transmission – Elaborative work of the couple.
Christopher CLULOW (Angleterre)
Co-therapy as interpretive action
The practice of offering two therapists to couples seeking help has been integral to developing the Tavistock approach to couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy and a feature of the clinical services provided by Tavistock Relationships over its 70 year history. The rationale for this practice, and the practice itself, has changed over time such that nowadays there are questions about its continuing usefulness. This paper summarises how co-therapy with couples has evolved in the UK and the arguments surrounding its practice. From this baseline, and using clinical illustration, it offers a new justification based on Thomas Ogden’s concept of interpretive action. It concludes by considering co-therapy in the context of research that highlights the significance of co-parenting for preventing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage
Keywords: Couple psychoanalysis. Interpretation. Co-therapy.
Philippe ROBERT (France)
History of the subject, history of the group
The psychoanalyst is trained in an individual listening. In front of a group and even more with a family as a primary group, he can be attracted by the psychic suffering of one of the member s. Conversely, there may well be a strong temptation to consider the group as a person without differenciate the individual psyche. In the same way are linked the individual history of each and the history of marriage and family. How can the analyst be then in a double listening ? To develop this question, we shall support on the couple first and on the teenager and his family secondly.
Keywords : Listening, Psychoanalysist, Individual, Family, Group
Massimiliano SOMMANTICO (Université de Naples, Italie)
The death of a brother: A family history
By referring to a clinical example of psychoanalytic family psychotherapy, the author highlights the relevance of the dynamics of hate and rivalry that characterize sibling links. In particular, the author analyses the rivalry identification of the daughter with her dead elder brother, and her hate link with her younger brother. The focus on the family’s common and shared psychic world allows these dimensions to be considered more in depth. The author describes a sequence of the psychotherapeutic work, also using dream analysis, by focusing particularly on a denial pact that characterises the family dynamic and on the interpsychic dynamics related to the replacement child. More generally, the author shows the importance of taking into account also the fraternal dimension – and not only the oedipal one – in working psychoanalytically with families.
Keywords: sibling complex, hate, identification, dead sibling, family functioning
Plenary session 6 : The work of the analyst: technical differences
Perrine MORAN (Angleterre)
Object Relations and Mentalization in Couple Psychotherapy.
Mentalization Based Treatment for Couple Therapy (MBT-CT) as practised at Tavistock Relationships combines an Object Relations psychoanalytic understanding of couple dynamics with a therapeutic approach which aims at increasing the mentalizing capacity of partners entrenched in a highly dysregulated relationship.
This paper will highlight the shift from interpretation to active questioning, and from promoting insight to stimulating self-reflection and curiosity. It will identify issues pertaining specifically to the application of MBT to couple work and explore the notion of a “borderline couple”. It will consider how psychoanalytic couple therapy and mentalization theory both emphasize, in distinctive yet complementary ways, the crucial role the early dyadic relationship with the mother plays in the development of thought and the ability to relate to another. It will also reflect on how the narrative at the heart of different theories relates to the way we listen to couples.
Key words: Mentalization – Projective system – Dysregulation – Dyadic relationship – Epistemic trust
Juan GONZALES ROJAS & Paloma DE PABLOS RODRIGUEZ (Espagne)
Psychic space and temporality in the Multifamily Group, convergence of biographies. Link memory and its relation to the unconscious.
The psychic space of the MFG brings and contains thought as presence and absence at the same time, generating an imaginary and a shared code that produce symbolism. There is a link memory (Ruffiot) and a duration (La durée de Bergson) and its relation to the unconscious and the various avatars of transgenerational transmission (Eiguer, Tisseron, Faimberg, Kaës). Our communication includes reflections about some clinical labels, from the work in Day Hospital, in therapeutic community, with patients with severe mental disorders and their families.
Time and space play here a essential role. During the sessions, multiple temporalities are simultaneously mobilized: the family biographies, the personal biographies of the therapist and the team members faced with the impact of resonances through listening. Also the temporality of the commun history of the team related to the process of the MFG history.
The space of the multifamily group is evocative and of new creation. It is a corrector of familiar places, in relation to the original fantasies, and in the redistribution of the “depositations”, discourses, social distances corresponding to the neoproduction of the group, a reorganization and discrimination of the intimate, private and public (Carel).
The work for the elaboration of these plans of realization of the psychism, of frozen situations and entrapment require the “catectización”, investment and frame work for a containment and support of this space of the re-creation of the link, and taking into account the intensity of the anxiety carried by the patients, we need a group conception on how to create the necessary containers to hold them and to manage them (Anzieu). This group conception must integrate thinking tools about the drive into intersubjectivity. The MFG has to be a place for the production of fantasy and figurability, a dream space, instead of the aggressive actings and the emptiness of serious patients; at the same time, a protective space from the inside, giving security to the participants, faced with destructiveness, and security against the outside.
We introduce several labels to show the confluence of the various temporal dimensions of the families, patients and the institution histories.
Key words: link memory, evocation, creation of figurability, group discourse, institutional container.
Hanni MANN-SHALVI (Israël)
New and Old in the couple’s interpersonal unconscious – Theory and Technique
Link theory and Object Relations theory understand differently how the couple’s personal history constructs their shared unconscious. The theory of intergenerational transmission of trauma adds an important layer to it. I will outline a theoretical integration of these three approaches.
Psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with the impact of past traumas. A focus on the future is usually attributed to other therapeutic approaches, such as behavioral, narrative, positive psychology, etc. I suggest that psychoanalysis, and couple and family psychoanalysis in particular, needs to complement the working through of past trauma with the working through of dreams and wishes regarding the future. This stage is also inherent in the working through process and has a central and unique place in our theoretical and clinical construction.
Through clinical vignettes, I will describe the technique through which the couple’s pathological structure goes through emotional development enabling the transformation to a more mature emotional structure.
Serge TISSERON (France)
Connected objects, new family stories
The omnipresence of screens in families creates new situations and conflicts. First, it creates new family responsibilities in terms of education, and can create new sources of tension, especially in the case of alternate care. On the other hand, children confronted by the insistent presence of new heroes, especially the YouTubeurs, choose their identificatory model earlier than in the family sphere, and develop a relationship with the world more dramatized than their parents and which can sometimes to strike at their incomprehension. The creation of links by physical proximity is replaced by that which is organized around shared centers of interest, with the appearance of “dead” families in which family ties are almost non-existent. Finally, family secrets find new spaces on social networks where they are sometimes lifted.
Key words: family, screens, technologies, identification, social network