This work is a second thought on the problem of pain in Freud which together with trauma and reality have never find a definitive place in the psychoanalytic theory. In effect the epistemological knots that troubled Freud are just the same that trouble contemporary psychoanalysis. In particular it is actual the division between who center the analytical process on the individual phantasy and who want reconsider the role of reality. The neuro-biological model of The Project has still conditioned the whole Freudian work. Death instinct appears a logical derivation of this hidden model. The tendency of nervous system to escape from pain appears not a clinical necessity but an expression of neuronal inertia that generates all the main regulatory principles of the psychic life. Neuronal inertia arrives directly to the hearth of death instinct that reduces to zero every excitements for shortest way. In this model pain is central and connected to the breaking of the protective barriers and to the trauma. Freud’s choice was to prefer intrapsychic reality to traumatic and external reality. The same concept of death instinct was born as attempt to resolve in an intrapsychic way the return of a traumatic reality considered too painful to be mentalized. Freud’s point of view was ambivalent in the writs, but doctrinal in institutional choices. This has been important for academic psychoanalysis that removed the pain problem until the 1970s. Trauma revaluation begins with Ferenczy and the latest Freud, but it was repressed. Winnicott and Bion finally throw the foundations of a intersubjective model that consider the other, the reality and the pain. This model his now spreading and appears congruent with actual research of the neurosciences, in particular with mirror neurons theory.[:]
Category: No 2 - June - 2011
Share this article