Effacement
Pons Nicolas, Sylvie
Effacement - 2019.
5
Like a sound playing in her head, a verse by Paul Valéry forced itself upon the author’s mind during her first meeting with a young patient. While she was reading the novel Austerlitz by Georg Sebald, this verse came back to her, sowing doubt: what was the link between Austerlitz and this student who seemed to present a rather obsessional organisation? A form of discourse, a way of relating, was evocative for her of an “operational” mode of functioning ( fonctionnement opératoire), which, in such cases, she assumed was a defence against a “fear of not existing”, which D.W. Winnicott suggested was another application of his notion of the fear of breakdown. Paradoxically, the subject organises a form of not existing in order to exist; the temptation of melancholia is not far off. This is what seems to have happened for Jacques Austerlitz; but in analysis the process of working as a double and of construction may help the patient to integrate traumatic experience, which will in turn lead him towards a sense of self-affirmation.
Effacement - 2019.
5
Like a sound playing in her head, a verse by Paul Valéry forced itself upon the author’s mind during her first meeting with a young patient. While she was reading the novel Austerlitz by Georg Sebald, this verse came back to her, sowing doubt: what was the link between Austerlitz and this student who seemed to present a rather obsessional organisation? A form of discourse, a way of relating, was evocative for her of an “operational” mode of functioning ( fonctionnement opératoire), which, in such cases, she assumed was a defence against a “fear of not existing”, which D.W. Winnicott suggested was another application of his notion of the fear of breakdown. Paradoxically, the subject organises a form of not existing in order to exist; the temptation of melancholia is not far off. This is what seems to have happened for Jacques Austerlitz; but in analysis the process of working as a double and of construction may help the patient to integrate traumatic experience, which will in turn lead him towards a sense of self-affirmation.
Réseaux sociaux