La compulsion de répétition et le processus de recouvrement : approches transdisciplinaires des enveloppes psychiques

Abstract

ContextIt is from our clinical practice in the “High Security Inpatient Unit” that we have been confronted with the compulsion to repeat and more specifically with the repetition of violent or even murderous acts. ObjectivesIn order to be able to think through fear in the transference, in the encounter with these patients, whose psychic arrangements fall within the field of psychosis, as well as the intrusion of both the physical and psychic envelopes that results from it, we have been interested in art and astrophysics. By proceeding in this way by analogy, we can modelize a topical representation of the psychic apparatus. MethodThis article proposes a transdisciplinary exploration of psychic envelopes in the case of Mr. N. – following the methodology of the single case, to think through the symbolization of violent action and of what we have termed the covering process. ResultsThe aim here, in a qualitative approach, is to highlight the violent act starting from a double articulation between psychoanalysis and art, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and astrophysics, on the other, in order to think through the work of symbolizing treatment by covering traumas as a fight against psychic dissolution. In doing so, it allows us to envisage a covering process in successive, superimposed envelopes, one might say, as many attempts to neutralize the affect of terror. InterpretationsThese transdisciplinary perspectives lead us to conceptualize a primordial psychic material at the confines of the “figurable” and the “symbolizable,” thus allowing us to think about the extensions of psychoanalysis and illuminate the psychopathological formations falling within the field of extreme suffering in the domains of subjects’ narcissism and identity.