Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The author presents issues related to old age, based on both the analyst’s own aging process and that of the patient. From the analyst’s perspective, the author reflects on the search for meanings that permeates this phase of life, seeking to comprehend the anxieties that arise at that time. Two clinical vignettes are exposed that shed light on some aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique in the process of analysis with elderly people.

The objective of this work is to consider aging as a stage of the end of life. Several crossroads intertwine from the fact of aging. Emphasis is placed on the body, the psyche, and the society and culture in which this aging is immersed – considering, in turn, the phenomenon of current population aging and the current global situation in which we find ourselves. Also considered is hyperconnectivity, violence, suicide, and the untangling of life and death drives that lead to self- and hetero-destructiveness.

This article presents interspersed fragments of a clinical case and a brief history of technical and conceptual modifications related to intersubjective phenomena in psychoanalysis. Countertransference, reverie, and the analyst’s own psychic functioning are highlighted, understanding them as important events for communication in psychoanalytical practice. To this end, the ideas of André Green, Thomas Ogden, Michel De M’Uzan and Giuseppe Civitarese are discussed, among other authors of contemporary psychoanalysis. The intrapsychic and intersubjective aspects of care connect and give voice to the psychological chimera (M’Uzan, 1978 and 1994), the analytic third (Ogden, 1994), the somatic reverie (Civitarese, 2016), and the corporeal effects of verbal and nonverbal communication (Civitarese, 2010, 2016 and Coelho Junior, 2010). The essay also seeks to understand and conceptualize the psychic paths (including the corporeal, imagery, affective, protosymbolic and symbolic levels) of the work of “digestion” and comprehension of this experience. The essay follows the complex elaboration – conscious and unconscious, verbal and nonverbal – that results in the transformation of the reverie into symbolic elements and their communication to the analysand.

This article aims to discuss the experiences of pleasure and vitalization in contemporary psychoanalysis from its connection with the concept and experience of intersubjectivity. We initially resort to the broad context imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the issue of the psychoanalytic framework (internal and external) and of technical modifications was imposed in an overwhelming manner. It is considered that some aspect of the intersubjective experience, something of the inter-corporeity, or of the co-corporeity, was lost in vitality and potency in the passage from in-person to virtual or online analysis. In a second moment, the article seeks to discuss the different figures of intersubjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis and explain a fundamental aspect of intersubjective dynamics in therapeutic processes, that is, pleasure and modes of vitalization and revitalization based upon co-corporeity.

The Fundamental Anthropological Situation is presented as the basis of the other’s enigmatic message and it’s translation, through the Generalized Seduction Theory. From there on, the word unconscious can correspond to three meanings: the unconscious in the freudian sense (the repressed), with imperfect residues of the message’s translation; the incarnated unconscious, constituted by messages that have not been translated, corresponding to the psychotic part of the mind and the pseudo unconscious of the symbolic myth, that has no place in the interior of the psychic apparatus.

A critical review of the well known relationship between mourning and adolescence is proposed in order to redefine its real dimension and to refuse its generalizations (considering what is sugested by authors such as A. Freud, P. Blos, A. Aberastury and O. Fernández Mouján), starting from the point of view and definition given by S. Freud in “Mourning and melancholia”. The author disagrees with the point of view that emphasizes the mourning issue in the adolescent process and justifies the characterization of this period as one of gains and evolutions instead of one of losts and grievances supporting his opinion in Freud’s concepts, such as the “pleasure prize”, as well as in a different characterization of the developmental process. The author explains his understanding of the mourning process and differentiates it from other related processes, such as the desidealization, in order to address the adolescent process using a variarity of concepts. Finally, the author focuses the parental issue concerning adolescence. At the end a summary of the author´s ideas is presented, reorganizing and characterizing his thoughts (concerning adolescence) including the implications that this understanding brings to the clinical practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of the adolescent patient.

This paper talks about the peculiarities of two privileged ways of communication in the psychoanalytic treatment of adults and children, namely free association and play. Play as equivalent of free association within children´s treatment as well as the presence of playful moments within adult’s treatment are pointed out as evidence of an intersection area between these phenomena.

Psychic conflict can both precipitate the fragmentation of the mental apparatus system and work as a starting point for a movement of significance and, consequently, integration into the internal world, transforming it upon into a rich but painful life experience. In this essay, literary activity is conceived as one of the forms to elaborate this conflicts. Likewise in the childhood games, the creation of characters is a manifestation of a function that stabilizes the maintenance of integrity and development of the psychism. To this effect, literary production is much more autobiographic than writers themselves usually admit. Some of these ideas are illustrated in two examples from literature.

As to introduce this thematic issue of the Psychoanalytical Journal of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society (SPPA), the author briefly examines some of the “current tensions” on the concept of “Unconscious”, mainly those related to the themes developed by the other authors of this number. Difficulties with language, communication in psychoanalysis, its scholastic tensions, questions related to the delimitation of the psychoanalytic field and on the nature of the unconscious are focused. Ultimately, a possible “evolutionary wave” on the theory of the unconscious is suggested, through the pursuit, by authors from diverse theoretical orientation, of models that integrate the various levels of mentalization in distinct zones of psychic functioning, considered co-existent and in dynamic relation.