by Paul Moyaert | Vol 25 (3/4) 2007
This essay examines why Socrates uses the Symposium of Plato to better understand transference in psychoanalytic treatment. The reason is found in Freud’s argument that transference is true love and that Eros is the subject of the Symposium. Can Socrates be seen as a precursor to Freud? Lacan’s answer is no. The knowledge of Socrates is not the knowledge of Freud. According to Socrates, love is oriented to what is good and the love for the individual is sublimated into a love that transcends the individual. This general idea on love is, in a certain sense according to Lacan, already contradicted by Plato in the final scene of the Symposium in which Alcibiades expresses his love for Socrates. In this exclusive love forces, such as envy and jealousy, come to the fore that do not sit well with Socrates’ metaphysics. The love of Alcibiades is not a failed love, but reveals what is missing in Socrates’ vision. If Socrates evaluates the love object from the point of view of a future satisfaction, Freud conceives the value of the object from the point of view of the drives.
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by Peter Walleghem | Vol 25 (2) 2007
In this case study of a thirty year old woman, we address the question of a particular form of transference love. Freud pointed out that the therapeutic functioning of a psychoanalytic cure relies on transference and that the development of this transference is based on our passions: love and hate. The position of abstinence adopted by the psychoanalyst creates, inevitably at times, a situation of unrequited love. The way in which the patient handles this structural impossibility of her love demands transforms her analytical adventure into a painful existential experience which allows us to question the very meaning of the (psychoanalytic) experience.
by Freek Dhooghe | Vol 27 (3/4) 2009
Reflecting on the past seventeen years, the author describes the vicissitudes of the notions of transference and constellation in the history of La Traversière. He does so on the basis of a consideration of the history of psychoanalytical theory on the work, via transference, with psychotic patients. In this sense, his story forms a plea for the recreation and safeguarding of the conditions under which we can work with dissociated transference by means of the constellation meeting, as introduced by Tosquelles in Institutional Psychotherapy.
by David Blomme | Vol 28 (1/2) 2010
Physical aggression incidents directly confront care workers with the limits of their capacity “to be good” to the patient. The severity of these incidents is not determined by the measurable and objective facts but depends upon the subjective experience of the victim. Coping with aggression within the context of an institution means giving team members enough room to verbalize this subjective experience in order to make working with the patient possible again. With three clinical cases it is shown how team members that took the opportunity to verbalize their subjective experience discovered, to their surprise, that they had contributed to the incident.
