Citation

Soumaki E, Anagnostopoulos DC. Psychiatrike 2018; 29(3): 257-263.

Affiliation

Department of Child Psychiatry, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Children's Hospital of Athens "Agia Sofia", Athens, Greece.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Hellēnikē Psychiatrikē Hetaireia)

DOI

10.22365/jpsych.2018.293.257

PMID

30605430

Abstract

DISCUSSION on defining therapy factors develops along two lines: one focusing on the interpretation and another focusing on the relationship. Changes in the socio-economic circumstances, cultural particularities, dismissal of institutions, constant negation, lack of boundaries, confusion of roles, various family secrets revealed due to "collapses," major conflicts, violence and aggression filling the individual as part of both the internal and the external reality - all are known risk factors causing the individual to experience trauma either due the nature of the received stimuli/threats or due to the loss of the enabling/supportive environment. Also, this situation affects the analyst's psychic structure as well. The analyst will have to strike a balance between their own internal objects, which under the circumstances activate the analyst's own suppressed conflicts, and the multiple intense projections of the analysand. First of all, the internal struggles taking place in the analyst's psychism regarding their own griefs, frustrations, and conflicts concerning their adjustment to the current reality, as well as individual griefs relating to their narcissistic doubts and the projections of omnipotence they receive. The question is whether the analyst will go through a destabilization process, being overwhelmed by psychic stimuli in multiple levels, or react with "manic defences" resulting, perhaps, in the prevalence of anti-psychoanalytic dynamics on the transference - countertransference axis. A second line of thought involves the internal struggles taking place in the psychic structure of the analysand, and often the "meeting" of the latter with the analyst through the "parallel process." Finally, we think about the multiple - due to psychic tensions - instances of enacting (or acting out) and the setting being put to the test in terms of frequency, fees, difficulty of symbolic processing, and aggressiveness towards the interpretations and demands of the analyst as object introjected to the superego and requiring "compliance" to certain standards, the setting principles. We refer to the internal processes resulting from conflicts in the therapists' psychic structure as regards their own internal objects, life experiences, frustrations in relation to the parent/authority, adolescent conflicts with the system, political views, life philosophy, and sense of fairness. Issues are more complex in the therapy of children and adolescents. Their mental condition is affected by that of their parents. When it is hard for the therapist to become an object of identification and idealization, since all institutions around them have been undermined, confirming the adolescent's guilt-ridden fantasy aggression? How, then, will the therapeutic process move forward when models crumble; when parents are being proved weak and unable to receive the aggressiveness of the independence-gaining process; and when reverie fantasies cease to exist? Today, more and more often we see adolescents who cannot develop because they are involved in their own parents' unprocessed situations. Despite the aforementioned difficulties, the therapy space as a setting with boundaries and empathetic functions could function as a "womb" that will give birth to new mental life. And this life will bloom as long as therapists preserve intact within them their values and principles - and their ability for reverie!

Language: en