Reflexões sobre o desamparo a partir de um caso clínico psicanalítico

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to study the experience of helplessness in the Freudian and post Freudian tradition. The starting point is the history of a woman’s psychoanalytic process that revealed her inability to respond to the usual, classical psychoanalytic procedure of free floating attention and interpretation. The patient suffered a breakdown in the mother-infant tie and was unable to manage her emotional life. The impasse led the author to make a research on the origins of anxiety and agony and to make a long review of the two Freudian theories of anxiety, the notion of trauma and the experience of helplessness. In search of new technical procedures to cope with the difficulties raised, he developed a study on Ferenczi, Winnicott and other contemporary authors who belong to the psychoanalytic intersubjective tradition. The emphasis on the environment and its traumatic or facilitating effects were considered at length. Clinical and metapsychological aspects of regression to dependence within the psychoanalytic setting were studied in order to respond to the patient’s need to regress to unlived life and as a way of re-living the not-yet-experienced early traumas