Infurchia, Claudia <br/><br/>
The spiral: a metaphor for the compulsion repetition? From the “death in the symbolic” to the desire for symbolic immortality 

 -  2024.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This article presents a case study from the clinical psychopathological angle, a collection of elements from psychotherapeutic encounters comprising two settings, a drawing-painting workshop for free self-expression, and face-to-face interviews, in a mental health unit. The patient, (in her fifties), painter and writer before her decompensation, is convinced that she is dead and eternal at the same time. The psychiatric diagnosis given is Cotard’s syndrome. The mediation care setting based on the drawing-painting workshop, allows this patient, reluctant to speak, frozen by her illness, to deposit on the canvas, a representation, a spiral. This recurring representation endured for many months will gradually evolve from a deadly repetition compulsion to a representation of life itself. It seems that the constraint to create, theorized by R. Roussillon, present in many artists, allowed this woman, for many years, to avoid the pitfall of psychotic decompensation. But it is possible to think that her creativity and her artistic production were defeated in the face of traumas of great intensity (separation, death). Melancholy recedes when this same representation linked to eternal torment is transformed into a symbol of life.