Actuality in the psychoanalytic clinic

pain, trauma, grief

Abstract

Contemporary clinical practice confronts us with notorious transformations in the modalities of psychic suffering that present themselves under the sign of “actuality”. It is not merely a matter of the incidence of epochal conditions on subjectivities and their discomforts, but of sufferings that reveal the emergence of severe modes of disengagement. The psychic excitation untied from the representational systems demands processes of symbolization and recomposition of the psychic fabric in order to propitiate more successful forms of elaboration. Based on a series of clinical vignettes from the analysis of a young girl, a metapsychological review of the psychic processes linked to pain, trauma and mourning is proposed, with the understanding that the symbolizing interventions that are deployed in the framework of the analytical treatment can propitiate the significant recapture of the real and expand the metabolizing and binding capacity of the egoic framework.