The author asserts that psychoanalysis can serve as both a meta-psychology and as psychotherapy for people who have sustained brain-injury. Changes of personality after traumatic brain-injury are well documented but a strictly neurological explanation is unsatisfactory (Damasio, 2003). We argue that psychoanalytic meta-psychology can explain how brain-damage translates itself into a changed personality and psychodynamics. The author starts with Freud’s “Project”, where he describes the essential function of the I as the inhibition of thoughts (images) that lead to pain, resulting in the so-called “thinking-defence” (Freud, 1992: 68). According to the author, this protecting influence of the I often fails in the case of patients with prefrontal lobe-damage. This will be illustrated comprehensively by a case-study.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
Institutional Psychotherapy
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing