ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:
The day on the Body in Psychoanalysis will offer psychoanalytic views on the body and its role in development from infancy to adulthood. Through the lenses of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, we will consider the current crises of body malaise and disaffected states, and the important concept of psyche-soma balance.
Since Freud (1901) in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we have known that the very everydayness is structurally anchored in the unconscious. It stems from the capacity to transition from a state of utter helplessness—that of the infant—to the state of being oneself; and thus, from a factual relationship—the ingestion of milk—one transitions to a phantasmatic relationship, the incorporation of the breast, and to the absolute demand for pleasure and love. The bond with the other is central, with incorporation, introjection, identification. The body plays a constant role, the sensorial body as the internal digestive system, between hunger and satiety.
The increase in autistic symptoms in childhood, of destructivity in adolescence, and of primitive defenses in adult analyses all create a need for therapists to develop improved receptivity and free-floating attention to non-verbal cues. This meeting will address the techniques of intervention and the specific quality in listening, feeling, and receiving that bring the analyst closer to patients’ complex and inchoate sensations associated with primitive traumas and early narcissistic damage. The day’s presentations will show how to recognize such issues in adult and child analysis, and how to develop a transitional space when dealing with archaic defenses and regression to primitive organization. Specifically, Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur will address the active aspects of receptivity in the creation and sustaining of any ongoing analytic relationship. Clinical material from infant, child, and adult cases will be used to lend deeper understanding of the theoretical points and discuss techniques in working with flat affect, absence of associative material, and obstacles in the development of the transference. Exploring the dynamics between psyche and soma and using the theoretical frame of the Paris Psychosomatic School, Dr. Anzieu Premmereur will talk about operational thinking and suppression of affects. Adult and child clinical cases of patients suffering from somatic illness and presenting some specific mental organization that requires technical changes in the analytic intervention will be presented
Morning Program:
The Body in Psychoanalysis with Child and Adult Cases
This presentation emphasizes the significance of the body in the analytic process. It encompasses the sensorial and emotional body, which observes external reality and is crucial in the transference-countertransference process. In psychosomatics, we refer also to the visceral biological, metabolic, and hormonal body. Understanding unconscious functioning requires a structured container and an organizer for body sensations and emotions. This is a crucial step in analytic work with non-neurotic patients, a topic of ongoing debate for years. This reminded us of Andre Green’s work on the negative, Didier Anzieu’s Skin Ego theory, Joyce McDougall’s addictive repetition; Bion’s contributions have been significant in these developments. The role of body sensations and corporeity has recently gained increasing interest in the psychoanalytic world. From primitive anxieties to the process of representing, the analyst acts as a developmental catalyst for the patient’s needs to grow. Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur will demonstrate, with clinical vignettes of young children and disorganized adults, how the model of offering representations and the use of the analyst’s free-floating attention can be beneficial with the analyst’s receptivity to nonverbal processes.
Afternoon Program:
On Psychosomatics
The Psychosomatic school of Paris had been created during the 70s by psychoanalysts from the Psychoanalytic Parisian Society, mostly Pierre Marty, Michel Fain, Rosine Debray and the pediatrician Leon Kreisler. They developed a specific technique of therapy for patients suffering from somatic diseases, after they have observed that most of them presented a very poor ability for playing with representations and feelings. The theory is about the quality of the preconscious functioning. Is the adult patient able to report about his life with representations, and are those representations fluidly associated and developed through a timeline? What has been discovered is how somatic patients have a very concrete way of thinking, poor imagination, poor emotional life, and a serious difficulty at associating ideas, feelings and representations; they give mostly a simple, concrete description of their actual present life, without reference to the past. The capacity for tolerating anxiety and conflicts is then limited. White depression, suppression of affects, lack of capacity for symbolization requires specific technique of intervention, light ‘conversation’ and exploring past trauma events. After an introduction to the Paris Psychosomatic School, Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur will present a Case report with some commentary. Finally, thoughts about contemporary technique with non-neurotic patients will be discussed.