Claudia Bartocci is going to compare some clinical cases. The overall progress of these cases allows to highlight some important points that distinguish Gaetano Benedetti’s theory and its relevance as a contribution from psychotherapy of psychosis to psychoanalysis as a whole:
The counter-transference role in anticipating and promoting the patient’s transference and in making a proper diagnosis (able to direct the therapy in order to intervene as early as it is possible and to prevent the chronicity);
The “interpretative action” as a key element to maintain a memory bond able to circumvent and overcome primitive defences;
The role of the “Transitional Subject”;
The dreams: BENEDETTI not only attaches a fundamental role to the manifest content but also ascribes to the dreams a prospective and predictive function;
The enactment as “the fourth Via Regia” to the unconscious.
Alessandra Calculli (an A. Ferro’s student) will introduce one of her clinical cases, highlighting counter-transference aspects.
In Ferro’s theory the goal of psychotherapy is to help the patient to build “thought tools” and uses everything in the psychoanalytic field as a derivate of awake dreaming activity. This is to give to the patient interpretation digested enough to be used.
The comparison between the cases followed by Benedetti’s and Ferro’s students will show how the importance given to the analysts’ ability in being present with them whole persons, analyzing primarily themselves, gives them the chance to catch the more subtle fluctuations of the psychoanalytic field, promoting a fast transformative process.
In all these cases counter-transference gives to the analyst the opportunity to ally with the “victim within the patient” challenging the persecutor the patient was identified in.
At the same time counter-transference analysis gives to the therapist the chance to know persecutory emotions that the patient cannot bear, being useful in treating severe mentalization disorders.
