The Regressive Magic of Words in Psychoanalytic Treatment

Abstract

Abstract The clinical vignettes evoked in this text open up, I hope, new lines of thinking and reflection, necessary in approaching the following fundamental issue: what does the archaic aspect of the analytic relationship consist of, considered a determining element for the changes and transformations induced by the psychoanalytical protocol? An indispensable question for the deepening of means of evolution for the psychoanalytical technique, directly determined by the diversity of personality structures and defence mechanisms which the method has been confronted with the past years. All the more so that what can be brought to light from the past never represents a faithful witness of the prehistoric age, but rather a heterogeneous product to the extent that every stage of life traversed by the human subject modifies in its turn « primitive » experiences. This is also the reason for which states of pathogenic regression do not allow an exact reconstitution of original situations. Especially since there is not much said about origin. Only the paradox can be noticed, that the origin is different from the archaic. An archaic that continues to produce meaning in the present, forcing psychoanalytical practice and its practitioners to adapt to modernity, thorough the strangest and most unexpected clinical forms thus convoked.