by Karen Deneckere | Full text, Vol 24 (2) 2006
This paper concerns a clinical fragment from the analysis of a four year old child. Several topics relevant for child analysis are addressed. We learn that a child who had abruptly decided to be silent, through the particularity of the transference bond, is once again enough at ease to tell his story. Symbolic exchange, together with the answer of the Other as mirror of language, allows the boy access to the oedipal constellation and allows him to reorient himself psychically. Through a process of drawing, of signifying, being signified, and of writing, we get a glimpse of the significance of language for the Oedipal structuration process.
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by Anna Koellreuter | Vol 30 (2) 2012
This article reports on a unique document which remained unpublished until 2009: the diary of a patient who was in analysis with Freud in 1921. Six fragments are presented and conclusions are drawn on how Freud worked with patients during that period, with particular reference to transference.
by Sara Bergmans | Vol 29 (1/2) 2011
In this article the author explores what is involved when working with dream material in a clinical setting. She starts with the difficulties Freud encountered in the Interpretation of Dreams when attempting to discuss this complicated material in a concise way. This leads the author to the matter of the interpretation itself. Using several of Freud’s articles she explores different approaches to the concept of interpretation and confronts the reader with some of Freud’s ideas on working with dreams. The theoretical part of the article concludes with a brief discussion of the Lacanian vision of interpretation according to Fink. This is followed by a substantial clinical section illustrating this theoretical material, using the case of a woman whose mourning process over the sudden death of her husband is problematic. Her dreams form an important part of the analysis in this case. The author concludes by elucidating in detail one session with the patient in which not only the ambiguity of meaning in dream material, but also the choice of a specific interpretation and its effect, is demonstrated.
by Dominique Hubain | Vol 29 (1/2) 2011
In this contribution the importance of dream interpretation in the treatment of the neurotic subject is questioned. Starting from the analogy between dream work and symptom formation, it is argued that dream interpretation constitutes for a fruitful way of exploring the unconscious in the cure. In order to relate dream interpretation to the end of the treatment, dream analysis is elucidated in its entanglement with transference. As an alternative to the kind of dream interpretation that pursues illusory completeness, or an interpretation of transference which leans on authority produced by it, working through is proposed as a path to the recognition of the lack in the Other. A clinical fragment about a dream concerning the transference is used to illustrate how dream interpretation not only functions as an opening of the unconscious, but can also be useful as a way or working through that brings the subject to a point where the human capacity to provide meaning reaches its limits.
by Anne Brun | Vol 29 (3/4) 2011
The originality of the setting in which therapeutic mediation techniques, for example, painting, pottery, modelling, are employed in child psychosis rests in the fact that the child can thus engage with an attempt at representation based on sensory modalities. These include the child’s own sensorimotor aspects and the sensorial qualities of the “malleable medium”. The manner in which he or she makes use of this is part of the transference dynamics. The clinician must therefore extend his or her capacity for attentiveness in order to take into account these various forms of sensorimotor expression. In child psychosis and autism, it is essential to focus on the kind of associativity that is an integral feature of body language and behaviour. In this paper, the author describes the specific nature of symbolization processes and of transference dynamics in mediation-based therapies, with particular emphasis on the importance of the transference onto the malleable medium and of the transference that makes use of sensory diffraction.
