EDITORIAL
DAVID BENHAÍM, EZEQUIEL A. JAROSLAVSKY
In this issue we continue our publication of texts presented at the Padua Congress, and are also inaugurating a new project that we have developed with the editorial committee: the publication in our journal’s three official languages of an article selected exceptionally by the editors; exceptionally, because from now on this selection will be handled by the editorial committee.
The use of mediating techniques in psychoanalysis of couples and families in a public family consultation center in Italy is the text that we have chosen. The author, Elena La Rosa, inquires into the “mediating” object and its properties and proposes, as she describes it, “some theoretical and technical considerations concerning the use of mediating techniques; for example, the genosociogram (A. Ancelin
Schützenberger), the double moon drawing (O. Greco) and photolangage
[photolanguage] (C. Vacheret), in a CFC (Center for Family
Consultations) in an Italian Public Service.”
The following article in this issue, Incorporation of the alien: a theoretical hypothesis on the process of adoption, by Ermanno Margutti and Fiorenza Milano, proposes hypotheses, on the basis of a clinical case, regarding the complexity and diversity of links that bind adoptive parents and adopted children in comparison to natural kinship. They consider the unconscious process through which a new family is constituted an incorporation of something foreign.
In her article, Familial link device for legal diagnosis and treatment in intrafamilial sex offenses, Cristina Nudel focuses on “prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.” Due to the proliferation of accusations, she suggests a selection process that permits the expert to exclude those that are false. She describes her objectives and method of analysis based on the review of a case in the light of her more recent investigations.
The couple-symptom and its effects on resistance in clinical work, by Lidia Levy, centers on the couple as resistance in both couple and individual therapy. The author observes that this occurs “when the modification of conjugal organization is unconsciously experienced as a risk, mainly in function of having deposited repressed aspects in the partner.”
A transgenerational mandate by Graciela V. Consoli takes a clinical case as a starting point from which the author “attempts to show how it is possible to find family connections, in an individual treatment, which lead us to narcissistic bonds between generations, that is to say, to something transgenerational.” Through psychoanalytic work, the author is able to determine the family mandate that has been transmitted between different generations.
The article, Technical challenges: co-therapy, transference and mediating techniques, by R. Constante–Pereira and T. Graça, includes reflections on the experience of therapy with a couple whose marital alliance has been destabilized by parentality. As the authors describe, “The lack of limits and confusion of identity, the no place in this family, finds a place in the flexible and creative container of listening in co-therapy.”
Conjugal self, symbiotic link and interpretation by Raffaele Fischetti is constructed around the concept of a conjugal self which the author defines as “an effect of active narcissistic links between the spouses.” As the author remarks, this article “refers to a certain configuration of the marital self: the symbiotic link and its vicissitudes in the psychoanalysis of a couple.”
Finally, we include a report by the International Ad Hoc Committee on the Beginnings of FP and the introduction of the family into the psychoanalytic process by Françoise Mével (Bordeaux, France), who was the moderator.
David Benhaim
Ezequiel A. Jaroslavsky
Co-Editors
IACFP Journal