Archives par mot-clé : Auto-sadism

Magali Ravit: addiction: a paradoxical operator

The addiction object is presented as a psychical operator of subjective experience. The logic of addiction functions against a background of trauma. Through the rhythm, the cadence, of substance use, the early dysrhythmias that cause feelings of impingement can be regulated. In the psychic configurations presented here, addiction is not merely a quest for pleasure; it is positioned as a regulator of sensorial and drive activity.

Adolescence, 2024, 42, 1, 153-165.

Gérard Pirlot : the guilty pleasure of remorse … or the one of teeth biting the eye of the unconscious

If in the case of the patient called “ Didier ” described by Bonnet, a whole psychotherapeutic work is necessary, once the narcissistic bases have been consolidated, to make remorse appear as the starting point of a genuine psychoanalytical work, things can be very different with a neurotic patient. Remorse, sometimes there from the start, actually attests to a too great attachment to the maternal imago, which then limits any possibility of subjectively assumed guilt. Thus the author, using a clinical vignette of a subject in analysis, after having brought remorse nearer to reproach and evoked the link between remorse and auto-sadism (narcissistic sadism), attempts to define what the term connotes meta-psychologically, following the different French and German etymologies of the term “ remorse ”… The drive economy of remorse reveals itself to be a putting into play of oral sadism mixed with scopic and controlling drives ; its dynamic is a conflict of psychical forces which may extend from hallucinatory perceptions (cf. the nightmare) to somatization (dizziness, “ second state ”, etc.) or passage to the act ; and finally, its topic is ego-splitting before the castrating omnipotence of a maternal and totemic superego ( “ an eye for an eye ”). In the sado-anal regression which characterizes it, remorse is a form of return of psychical function into the “ primitive cavity ” described by Spitz, which then serves as a “ container ” for the ego’s Self (its the narcissistic bases). The subject in the throes of remorse, like Cain, or Oedipus at Colonnus, “ crushed ” (subjectively) by a guilt that menaces the cohesion of the Self of his ego, can regress alone in remorse until he “ re-bites ” (re-mord) repeatedly this ego through an “ incisive ” and castrating superego. The therapeutic and analytic treatment of remorse will aim to “ transfer ” on to the psychoanalyst, through speech, the guilt underlying this remorse in order to free it from this self-sadistic auto-erotic muck which is remorse.