The Area of the «Poetic» in Borderline States

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The Area of the “Poetic” in Borderline States

Maurizio Balsamo

To cite this version:

Maurizio Balsamo. The Area of the “Poetic” in Borderline States. THE ITALIAN PSYCHOANA-LYTIC ANNUAL, 2015, 9, pp.51-69. �hal-01496742�

The Area of the «Poetic» in Borderline States

Poetry expresses a particular relationship with time and with cognition, observed Iosif Brodskij in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987. When a poet writes, and is surprised by what emerges, never knowing in advance what will come out of it, well, at that moment «the future of language invades its present. There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third)» (Brodskij, 1988). Brodskij's observation defines a feature of the creative dimension, yet not that dimension alone: the possibility of meeting what has not yet been thought, and of allowing oneself to be passed through,

«possessed», by the object's unforeseen qualities, in overly general terms has to do with the symbolizing workings of the psyche towards what it cannot accept at a given time, the generation of repression, the dimension of infiltration of what has been repressed and the effort to integrate it. In this formulation I would highlight, however, mainly the issue of the prophetic, guarantor of the advent of the new, and the fact that the poetic determines a transformation of time.

The idea of a «future which invades the present» and which defines poetic space in such a way is not totally new to us. Valery (1948) in speaking about his writings,1 had already referred to «leftovers of the future», furtive beings opening up unforeseen paths. It should not surprise us greatly to learn that the new, that things which have never previously occurred, make their way into present time in the guise of residues, leftovers and fragments, given the anti- syntactic or deconstructive nature of the poetic and its characteristic of placing in tension the identity of meaning and of the speaking subject

(Kristeva, 1980).

In this vision the future can only reach where the ego makes itself absent and the word prevails over discourse, the marginal or the detail prevails over the centre, the fragment over the whole and synthesis. However, this may indicate both the capacity to germinate the new (the prophetic which invades present time, altering it), and the

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1 In F. Gantheret (2014).

-same transformation of temporal categories, in the sense that it is in that moment that both the present and the future are established.

Similarly: taking inspiration from a beautiful expression by Imre Hermann, analytic treatment can be seen as a machine to «capture chance»,2 to

introduce noise into a more or less stable organization (and from the degree of stability, that is to say, of the availability of fixations sufficiently consolidated as to allow regressive movements, derives, as we know, the enormous issue of the time and the manner both of the introduction of noise and that of its being placed as a backdrop to favour minimal forms of organization). My intention, in this paper, is to define certain aspects of psychic functioning lacking a «poetic» listening, that is to say, organisations characterised by what appears to be a reduced transformability indicator, by a lack of subjective points of view and hypotheses and by stories with little narrative and figurative gradient. Equally important is the use of monosemic language, adherent to the thing, the cancellation of anything that could refer back to the «Other Scene» in order to avoid contact with traumatic or destructive perceptive traces and experiences, as well as the presence of major representational and autobiographic difficulties. Thought appears hindered, and temporality confused, annihilated - think of the static time of the melancholic or of obsessive rituality - or absent, given the condition of an immobile and fossilized current time, without either present or past, for the simple reason that everything is at the same time in the scene and insists in it. Thanks to this complexity we can better understand why present, past and future do not have the same meaning in analytic terms.

Gantheret (2014) observed that psychoanalytically only the present is real (in the sense of what exists here and now), while the past is a story inhabited by nostalgia and the future is built by desire. Only the present is real as only in it can the sensation, the experience and the possibility of living the transference take place.

The analytic act, in this just like the poetic act, only lives in the present of its immediacy, its feeling, of the pure instant which escapes narration (we may think, on the contrary, of that de-affectivising machine which we come upon in the «archaeological» pleasure of obsessive thought) or is threatened by it (as immediate distancing, for example in intellectualizations). Something must occur, now, again, and for the first time, so that the veils of the past may part and open up to the future. Yet for this to take place the space for discourse must open to that of the word, the symbolic must allow itself to be questioned and deconstructed by the semiotic-instinctual (Kristeva, 1980),3 and something places the «religious» in every speech in tension, that is to say, the adherence or the illusion of adherence of language to the «thing», its untouchable core, or to the solely communicational level. Obviously, this occurs

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2 Hermann (1986, 656): «The psyche represents one field in communication with the innumerable fields of the external world».

3 According to Kristeva the semiotic is the mark that the drives leave on language.

-each time that psychic activity is able to tolerate contact with what it has repressed or evaded experiencing, with the paradoxical pleasure that is established in circumscribing affect impulses, which are thereby perennialised, the withdrawal of investment which thereby derives when the repressed may be integrated, and so on. In short, in all sufficiently organized frameworks of psychic functioning, in which drives infiltrate the secondarised dimension of the mind in a way which is neither chaotic nor destructive.

We well understand, then, why in every language, and particularly in poetic language, there is a dimension which is heterogeneous to signification, an excess of meaning that goes beyond the relationship with the object to be designated and possessed. «This hetereogeneousness detected genetically in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences; this hetereogeneousness which is later reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in the psychotic discourse serving as ultimate support of the speaking subject threatened by the collapse of the signifying function» (Kristeva, 1980, 33). That is, the semiotic-instinctual tends to deconstruct/bend language, in a prevalently disgregating manner, as in the case of psychosis, or creative manner, as in poetic language.

In both cases, however, and clearly in the poetic, it finds a minimal form of primary organisation in the rhythmic structures which articulate and give shape to its output, even leaving in the background the content of the message or the meaning of the discourse to sustain, through these forms, a minimal level of egoic structuring.

As can be clearly seen in the case of echolalias, of the assonances sought in the excitatory condition or in the psychotic refrain where itsself-protective value may be grasped, there is a sort of barrier to linguistic exchange with another and fossil trace of early parental relationships (Grosclaude, 1996). In this sense, the poetic takes on the theoretical foundations of a sign of the drives4: we may say that it expresses the first appropriation and structuring of the speaking subject. At the same time, the rhythmic structure expresses an original, protective/organisational manner in the meeting with drives, and, as previously mentioned, some of its modalities may be commonly found in psychotic issues.

In the relationship between the poetic and the new, rhythm takes on a dual valency. On the one hand it is the expression of the drives in its anchoring to the body; we may think, for example, of the construction of rhythm starting from the sound of the mother's heartbeat (Fonagy, 1991), a traceof the appearance and disappearance of the other.5

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4 «The semiotic activity, which introduces wanderings or fuzziness into language and, a fortiori, into poetic language is, from a syncronic point of view, a mark of the workings of drives (appropriation/rejection,

orality/anality, love/hate, life/death)» (Kristeva, 1980, 136).

5 Abraham (1985) has written interesting pages on the relationship between odd and even rhythm as oscillation between fusion/separateness and on how this dialectic is taken up again: we may think of the famous fort/da, in linguistic representation.

At the same time, it offers itself in its anti-regressive characteristic, therefore protective towards the «extinctive» tendency of the drive. Examples of anti-regressive function are given by the rhythm of repetition, which acts to ensure continuity and para-excitation, by that of alternation, which enables the establishing of a before and an after, of a same and a different, and by that of rhythmic opposites. All these modalities regulate, filter and give order to the chaos of the workings of drives (Bizouard, 2006). Thus, in the relationship between infants and environment, rhythm ends up ensuring a

welcoming/regulatingdevice which enables exchange and continuity, novelty and identity, creation and rediscovery of a stable form.6

Through rhythm one builds a past (previous sounds which now are grouped into a form) and a future is anticipated (the sounds to come).

In terms closer to our experience what is needed first of all is a transcription of the perceptive traces, without which one will either have non-symbolic links to deal with these traces (perversions, masochistic phenomena, narcissistic pacts, sexualisation of trauma, somatosis, etc.) or the return of the same in destructive forms. The poetic is the representational configuration of this first transcription and its absence indicates a deficit in primary symbolisations (Roussillon, 1999), that is, the difficulty to move on from the «thing» to its representation, allowing an oscillation between multiple realities, senses, scenes and stories.

The construction of an organisation aimed at the reception/production of unusual forms, of the unexpected within the constancy of a structure - the place, the setting, etc. - «an untouched or uninterpreted backdrop»

(Codignola, 1977), defines the specifics of the work of analysis, construed as the activity of binding/unbinding of constructs of the ego and of the attempts it makes to take control of an event, enveloping it in the already seen or heard.

This activity takes place mainly in the development of the associative processes of the mind, in the dynamic of the loosening of pre-existing conceptual chains, of the emerging of latent chains and the creation of new articulations; it enables the germination of new states of being, of

self-representation and the symbolising assumption of the remnants introduced in this same self-recursion.

Therefore it is not only a matter of getting blocked thoughts, affects, o symbolic representations, moving again. Willingness to make associations is to be understood as the generative and self-reflexive capacity of the mind, regulated/hindered by defence mechanisms, or impeded by the struggle against thought, by the use of stereotypes and adhesive identifications, by the individual's narcissistic and superegoic seductions. In other terms, it is a matter of building terrain suitable to take on board existing, often negativising tropisms, and the spontaneous creation of affective/representational

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6 A similar perspective, articulated around the opening/organisation nexus, was developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1997) with regard to the refrain, designed as a prism generating functions of territorialisation and de- territorialisation, concatenations of new territories, etc.

-movements which may be addressed to a new object. It is here, at bottom, that the problem arises of how to create the treatment conditions capable of unblocking the self-constrictive or frankly homicidal mechanism of thought and affects. Or, if one prefers, the issue is to understand how it may be possible to hope to reintroduce the poetic into the pure identitary assumption of «that's the way it is, because that's the way it has always been». If we may consider, along with Green, a phobic dimension of associativity (Green, 2000),7 particularly evident in borderline states, but also in others, it is because the wear and tear caused by associative thinking, the wear and tear that is introduced thanks to the circulation of thoughts and affects (Balsamo, 2012b), necessarily determines a re-questioning of the identical and the appearance on the scene of the difference in the reign of the thing, which can often take on particularly anguishing aspects.

It is sufficient to think of all those clinical situations in which, as repetitivity prevails over the present, over what goes on repeating itself without ever being able to become past (i.e. memorable and forgettable), we are immersed in immobile time or in the non-time of a claustrophiliac condition (Fachinelli, 1992), or in which the imaginative process appears to be obstructed by deadly imagos (Balsamo, 2012a, 2013). In such cases, transference seems no longer to play itself out along the dual levels of transference on the word (the intrapsychic pole of the enunciation and of the experience, i.e. the possibility of a subjective listening to one's utterances, with the effects of estrangement, surprise, reflexivity and working through that it allows) and on the object (the intersubjective object of the analytic relationship), but seems instead to lean solely on the object/analyst reality.

This latter shall then be convened in its material reality, in its constantly evoked and fragile presence, in the quantity of words pronounced, in the rhythm of its eloquence, in the necessity, as can clearly be seen from Winnicott's analysis of Little - of adjustment ofthe analytical position, and of the setting, of what may occur in it, of the frequency of the sessions or their duration, etc. Especially, in this prevalence, it is a matter of the need to no longer think of the analytic situation as a two-person psychic apparatus, but rather as a space in which the analyst'spsyche acts as a counter-point to the other person's reflexive, symbolizing or imaginative shortcomings, with the consequent issues relating to the value of truth, to the conviction or the suggestion that Freud initially put forward in Constructions in Analysis.

Naturally, the poetic function is not exhausted in its relationship to time or to the production of an estrangement in the familiarity of language. In defining the various functions of language, Jakobson observed that «Speech implies a selection of certain

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7 As is well-known, by phobic dimension of associativity we mean the extreme difficulty of some patients to evoke affect states, associate thoughts which are distant from each other, abandon the level of the concrete and the pure occurrence of events, on pain of a return to split dimensions which are experienced as sources of great anxiety and in numerous cases are

-linguistic entities and their combination into -linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity. At a lexical level this is readily apparent: the speaker selects words and combines them into sentences according to the syntactic system of the language he is using» (Jakobson, 1986, 17). The selection and combination in more complex lexical units determine the creation of a multiplicity of functions: cognitive, phatic, referential, poetic… Language is not useful only to designate or communicate, but also to achieve states of being, define relational movements, maintain the contact between speakers, and so on. Among the functions, the poetic is characterised, in Jakobson's opinion, by the pressure of similarities, or of identities, on the formation of sequences of speech, characterised instead by differences. What in ordinary language is at the level of a paradigm, in poetic language takes action (rhythm, rhyme and alliteration, equally ways of representing the actualizing of the paradigm in speech), determining a heterogeneity, an oscillation between sense and non-sense which cannot be traced back to the meaning. In it, we may say, the voice drowns out what is uttered: understood as a mark of the drive and of the forms of its treatment, inscription of the encounter with the object, to a certain extent it articulates the discourse. As Lyotard (1991)

observed, the phoné strikes discourse «below the belt». It bursts its eardrum, or shuts its ears.8

In short, it bends ordinary language to its needs and at the same time, thanks to this singular twist, defines the connection required on each possible construction of stories, tales, establishing the limit, the «archeological remnants» which impose a need on a story, that of respecting and accepting a mandate.

However, the possibility of acceding to the poetic dimension of language, the difference between it and ordinary words, is that it «is perceived differently thanks to the effect of the setting which makes one understand something in a different way from what is said, perhaps in acknowledgement of the extra-linguistic, perceived in the form of a negative hallucination»

(Green, 2011).9

In other words, the question of language in psychoanalysis and the possibility of having (later) access to the poetic of the word (that is, to the Other Scene), cannot be imagined outside of the particular situation provided by the setting, the place where the word is subjected to the deformation that is produced by the particular analytic situation, which attempts to trace the instinctual, historical and relational roots which drive the production of a given enunciation and which determine its reception not only in terms of meaning but also on a pragmatic, emotional, rhetorical, etc. level.10

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8 Ref. Ogden (2005, 129): «Tone reflects what the speaker is feeling; voice reflects who the speaker is, the way he thinks, how he organizes his emotional experience».

9 Translated by the translator of this article.

10 «The psychoanalytic method», wrote Garella, «while operatively centred on the spoken word, does not in fact place it at the centre of its theory: the interest in language induces one to grasp what is to be found on either side of language, albeit without giving up verbal communication as a common, final way» (in Berti Ceroni, 2005). Note Translated by the translator of this article.

-The domain of psychoanalysis is the act of the word, not language. In his Le langage dans la psychanalyse, Green discussed the relationship between poetic function and analytic word, observing that even the most ordinary word can and may be «also understood differently […] its creative potential leads to the intervention of the paradigms that the poet and poetic analysis render visible and which bind the sense to the senses, more than one may imagine» (Green, 1984).11 Unlike Green, however, I think that it is more interesting to take into consideration the poetic going beyond writing, in whichhe, to all intents and purposes ends up confining it, considering it, instead, a marker of a drive repressed by the symbolic/representational system (the extra-linguistic negatively hallucinated, in Green's words) and that in it makes its way back in the form of metaphors, rhythms, assonances, traces, etc.

We could say that as trace and memory of the processes of primary transcription, it allows the back and forth between the affect and representational dimensions. In a certain sense, the poetic (re)presents the drive, thanks to its treatment, in a structure which renders it usable, germinative, and not traumatic.

Not by chance, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Freud begins, as we know, by speaking of the poets, and not simply to give them the

«institutional» role of being allowed to speak of love, but to highlight how the poetic is a place which germinates transformation, creation and opening up of worlds. The poets, writes Freud (1910, 165), «For this reason cannot reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but must isolate portions of it, remove disturbing associations, tone down the whole and fill in what is missing». In other words, they transform, graft, select and create. They also exclude, neglecting what resists the pleasure of aesthetic transformation, but in this cutting there is the singularity of an act which, according to Jakobson, takes on the role of protecting us from automatisation and degradation.

Poiesis, creation, transformation, the dimension of singularity inherent in the act itself, able to cross language - that which has always been - to inflect it, make it speak differently, are effectively all moments and expectations of our work. Like the poet, the analytic act takes place in the promise of the new, in being violent to language, to what was already there, reintroducing, as the Russian formalists used to say, estrangement into automatization, to introduce a difference, a joke, a different-theorein (i.e. a seeing), in the ability to generate recoursiveness which produce chains of meaning which cannot be delimited a priori. However how can we deny that it is absent in numerous treatment situations, and that at times it seems impossible to stretchto the «conjunction» of the analytic enterprise with the poetic act, with the former bent solely on the axis of repetition, of monosemics, of denial of another meaning? In actual fact, it is not difficult to observe how in certain cases we come up

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11 Translated by the translator of this article. 57

-against a total lack of the narrative dimension of the mind, with the impossibility of meeting what André Green defined as the central elements of the mind's capacity to make associations in the session, i.e. retroactive reverberation, the anticipatory annunciation, and lastly, the dimension of irradiation and of virtuality in arborescence. Basically, this area of phenomena which I define phenomenologically as «absence of the poetic» and, more clinically, as the arresting or severe restriction of associative processes, defence against the return of perceptive traces, on pain of the arrival of primitive agonies or radical checks of being, phobia concerning emotional contact and the metaphoric risk of language, defines the change in paradigm arising in the shift from clinical cases of neuroses to those of borderline states, or to that which has been defined as operating thoughtin psychosomatic patients (ref. the classic works by De M'Uzan, Fain, Smadja, etc.), or to that which McDougall called the anti-analysing in analysis and which characterised how a patient of whom «we do not hear clearly another sense beyond what the patient is saying[…] As to content there is poverty of the language and lack of affect. There is a sort of cut, an abyss that separates the subjects from both their intimate objects and instinctual life» (McDougall, 1993, 217). We may generically define these conditions as borderline situations in analysis, in which the role of thought, of negativisation of the setting, the possibility of interpreting, the search for new ways of representing oneself and living oneself are subject to substantial alteration (Donnet, 1999).

Following certain of Green's formulations, this change of paradigm marks the moving from a clinical/theory model based on the tripod:

setting/dream/interpretability (in short, the field given by the representative functions and by the memory of one's experiences, albeit subject to repression), to one characterised by: 1) internal setting (alluding by this to the innumerable modifications which intervene in the management of the treatment of such cases, the face-to-face, the variable number of weekly sessions, the particular role of countertransference, to the feeling of absence of transferential relationship); 2) traumatic act or dream; 3) analytic work which attempts, first and foremost, to achieve the conditions for the development of representability and therefore of interpretability.

In the light of what I have said, the change of paradigm could also be defined as a shift from «rhythm, representation, interpretability» to «analyst's internal disposition, mental stance in action, work of (construction) of representability».

We find ourselves dealing with severely amputated, opaque or fragmented autobiographical constructions, rendered mute by the destructive dimension of the force of «unbinding», or situations overlaid by the impossibility of representing representational movement, the capacity to invest a continually devalued psychic (the Other Scene is missing, observed McDougall), alongside the construction of a ferociously idealised self which declines any meeting with the other. The issue here for these subjects is to organise themselves by means of particular dispositions (psychic,

-behavioural and relational) with the aim of avoiding the return of the perceptive and, with it, of non-symbolized, non-subjectivised experiences, chaotic traces, or archaic, traumatic memories. This explains the recurrent monosemy, the feeling of boredom or of an existential vacuum, the need to control the object and its affirmations (Balsamo, 2011a), paying attention to all its changes, which will then be understood not as changes to the points of view, but as duplicity of the word given, unreliability, lies. An area of phenomena which may equally well be described as the primacy of language over the word or of the impersonal on subjective transcription.

One may think, in these situations, of a work of the negative which leads to the cancelling of the subject, «a negative hallucination of the subject performed by the subject himself», as Green proposed.

Often, in the brief and meagre flashes that some patients of this type bring on their lives, certain salient characteristics of their mental functioning emerge that attract our attention: complete absence of relationships, radical affect isolation. «I was never able to touch my daughter as a child, or to play with her - says one patient - this body of hers that kept moving upset me, maybe that's why she hates me and won't speak to me». Rarefied, disconnected events, apparently characterised by a sort of strange insignificance and which appear, to a retrospective eye, like wandering lumps of bonds and perceptions in a liquid universe and in which the analyst's confusion in listening to such accounts is at times expressed through a sense of bewilderment or feelings of distrust or incredulity. Or a history emerges that has essentially been built around a symptom and its permanence over the years,12 a sort of identity trace and at the same time a process of de- signification; at times confused accounts full of anxiety, centred on childhood conditions marked by the terror of parental reactions, characterised by their uncontrollability and substantial inexplicability.

It appears evident, in the cases that I have indicated, that the patient has been reduced to silence, or has organised himself around it, and that the survival strategy has been that of syntonizing himself as rapidly as possible with the aggressor's states of mind, so as to grasp its psychic movements in advance. I would also like to add, as a working hypothesis, that some of these patients seem not to be able to avail of affect states as they are constantly intent on the revealing/identification/monitoring of the other's affect states, felt as being particularly threatening and destructive. Affect becomes more a signal to seek in the other, for the purposes of confining it, depriving it of its relational dimension, and of its ability to refer to the other than self.

As we may deem valid the hypothesis that the role of primary objects is severely damaged, along with their utilisation as transformational objects, as is the attempt to think of oneself with and through the other, the consequence is solutions characterised

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12 «All of these patients have a belief system which is the key to an explanation of their issues» (McDougall, 1993, 220).

-by denial of experiences of dissatisfaction, of suffering and needs ignored, with significant consequences for the representative and emotional capacities. The denial or the devaluation of the subject's drive dimensions, opposition to the perceptive and therefore to experience, the only sign of the truth of one's thoughts and affections, is therefore accompanied by a representative activity which is either bare or built up against the recognition of one's own truths.

Basically, it is the self-representative dimension of the mind which is attacked, with the consequence that we are often led to consider the underground, representative dimension to be scarce. As I mentioned, such patients observe the object's movements in a persecutory manner, they test his states of mind, second-guess his directions and intentions, intuit and project massively, later swallowing the different sensations and instantaneous reflections which arise out of others' states of mind. At the same time, the impossibility to render the primary object «absent», due to a psychic inscription made arduous by the uncontrollability and paradoxicality of the object, or due to defensive incorporation (more widely because of the original interdiction to create a space free from colonisation by the object), also accounts for the struggle against more developed psychic processes. What substantially occurs is a faux self construction which at the same time allows the person to incorporate the object's psychic qualities, to become estranged from it, and to destroy emotions, avoiding the risk of a «poetic transformation», a resonance which leads to re-inserting the object into the subject's field of perception (McDougall, 1993), safeguarding, however, at the same time, fragments of drives which are more authentic yet constantly denied and hidden.

This aspect appears important to show how in the catastrophic oscillation between intrusive presence and abandonment distance, or between psychic death and tenacious clinging (in a dis-temporalisation of the transference generated by an interminable analysis - Donnet, 1990), the word is used not so much to communicate profound aspects, which on the contrary are feared, as to maintain contact with the object in a form which protects both from excessive distance and from anxiety-creating closeness.

If the affect dimension, the possibility of retracing the different strata of time, the reverberation of meaning, the construction of unthought thoughts, crossing identity ramifications once more, appropriation of the meaning and of elements of the psychic universe which until then had remained on the sidelines, represent the fundamental aspects of what we define the classic analytical situation, what aspects do we find, instead, in certain clinical conditions which are related to autistic-like conditions, borderline states or deep narcissistic and identity anxieties?

A patient, Ludovico, expresses himself thus: «I am very depressed, I don't know what I am coming here for, you know my problems, I would like to understand why I am not able to get the job I would like to have and find a girlfriend». This patient presents

-with highly pronounced emotional -withdrawal characteristics, refers about a very rigid family background which is borderline persecutory and rejects any instinctual impulse. To give an example, when he had his first erection, or in any event what he remembers as the first, he was very frightened of what had happened and was brought to a doctor for suitable treatment - tranquillisers - to rid him of that «strange vexation». He never received toys as gifts, «they were considered useless objects», he had no friends in childhood, which was spent therefore in absolute and unhappy withdrawal, under the control of a father who, in his speech, incessantly exalted the more extreme dictatorships. Closed, taciturn, he has difficulty in evoking aspects that went beyond day-to- day life, and even in such case with few details. Although he had been in therapy with many therapists for innumerable years, I have the feeling that it all slid over him without leaving a trace. Accounts of previous experiences are poor and in addition point out their failure and uselessness. At the same time, what we are dealing with is, I consider, a work of emotional impoverishment, of de-signification and of migration of the hatred from the primary object to the analytic situation. Which leads us to think that, beyond his denials, something did happen, and that, although hate and rejection are the primary features which characterise this type of analytic relationship, a certain psychic work appears to take place in any event (Balsamo, 2012c).

The feeling in front of this type of patient is, in my turn, that of living through a real difficulty in establishing emotional contact and thought, in which my allusions or my observations aremocked, rendered inert by a significant concretisation of relevant thought, by a «I cannot know how things stand» which often accompanies my interventions, thus deprived of any resonance. I find again, here, that countertransference sentiment of indifference and paradoxical loss of curiosity and empathy towards the other that McDougall mentions with reference to her robot-patients. Yet, despite everything, even in such particular conditions I still experience brief although intense moments of emotional intimacy: a glance, a smile, a delicate comment. These moments are rare but important: they seem to be able to show that the aim of the treatment must not be only (an idea that I have little by little come to take into consideration) to provide a surrogate for life, as if the therapy were used as a substitute for one's existence, but that a real meeting, at times, is possible.

We find ourselves effectively facing a substantial paradox: the therapy is sought and rendered helpless, in its being nothing but a struggle or a fight to the death of subjects to impose their own point of view. However, at the same time, it appears to be a protected relationship, a relationship in which the parent is not so crazy as to produce more assassinations of the soul, and sufficient to enable the experiencing of rare, silent moments of intimacy and pleasure in a universe which in any event remains a desert. Emotional rigidity and the use of the other as a mere instrument of narcissistic

-support are evident: at the same time, the object is constantly devalued in the seeking for or in the fantasy of another who is better and more important. An object is often valorised (in a superficial and extraniating form) as soon as there is the semblance of the possible start of some relationship, but for the purpose of diminishing the importance of the present object. This movement does non concern ambivalence, it is an out and out negativisation of being, constructing a simulacrum of life and interest, in which each approach (even if imaginary) is immediately negated by the rapid and violent disinvestment of the object.

What derives is a sort of distrustful resistance to the intervention and to the proposals made, which end up coinciding, in their deaffectivated transformation, with the bizarre nature of the parent's responses. The path of the sessions wanders through brief accounts of everyday events without any emotional resonance. At bottom, it is up to the analyst to find it, create it, and it is interesting to discover how one's willingness to hear is experienced as the acceptance of a possible chance to live, like a permit to be and to exist. I think that this area of phenomena offers a good illustration of the poetic functioning of the act of analysis, in the sense of not giving in to the appearance of experiences lived through or accounts presented, and of the willingness to seek out a subject hidden in the constant sameness of repetition, in the valorisation of non-confessed perceptions.

Ludovico: «How can I believe what you say? Each therapist has given me a different explanation, just as you have, by the way. If I leave here and go to another I will get another explanation. There is nothing scientific in all of this».

Analyst: «You could try to listen to what you feel and judge from that».

L. «I don't feel anything. Don't you understand that it is all time wasted?»

After a short silence:

A. «However, you become angry when I ask you to try to feel yourself. So you do feel something, even if it is difficult to admit it to yourself».

L. «I prefer that others do the thinking».

A. «Yes, certainly, and that way you can check that they are not too crazy. However, you indicate to me, when you tell me about what you are experiencing, in the way in which you tell me, that you always have an idea about what is happening, even if you are not able to say it to yourself».

Ludovico remains in silence for a few minutes, then: «As a child it happened that I tried to speak, but my father began to shout and my mother agreed with him, saying that I was strange and bad because I challenged my father».

A. «Are you saying that from a very early age you learned to think in silence, without showing it?»

-Ludovico nods and then he speaks to me about a girl that he has met and of what happened, not hesitating, through an apparent and anonymous description of the situation, to actually make me privy to his secret thoughts. The hidden perceptions, the sign of the drive taken on board by the subject, the possibility of a second scene, beyond the apparent one, can thus emerge. In this way, the emergence of self-observational material adhering solely to the parental idiomatic expressions which have become encysted over time is countered, as if the most important although temporarily fruit of the associative contact was that of being able to designate, without however ever being able to do anything with it other than proclaim an edict, the ways in which others have seen the subject. One may speak, on this matter, of total appropriation by an intrusive and disqualifying object which denies the right to pleasure, to the expression of one's own needs, to psychic differentiation and autonomy. The tyranny of prohibitions and interdictions is expressed particularly in mental functioning, as if there should only be one point of view, i.e. the one imposed by real and phantasmatic parental constellations, derived from their work of destructuring statements which, once fragmented in the effort to neutralise them, lose any contextualisation and any possible conflictual dynamic, assimilated to untranslatable, split and mortifying superegoic imperatives. This also explains his extreme anxiety in coming into contact with the transformation of points of view, integrations or out-and-out changes of interpretation that may arise during the work of analysis.

The impediment to a desiring relationship may, on the other hand, take hold in the analyst who finds himself incarnating, in the temporal collapse of repetition, the agent of the first disinvestments. We may say then that any assessment of the conflict between erotic and destructive dynamics inherent to the clinical material imposes additional work, that is to say, taking on one's «own» psychic processes invested by the force of untying. Obviously, we may offer different responses to this impact, based on our degree of psychic and processing tolerability and, even more radically, depending on the unconscious pacts built up by the psychoanalytic pair which enables the past which does not pass to be re-actualized. In other terms, is the relationship between disinvestment processes and the effects of these on our possibilities of functioning not a real issue to reflect on? Psychic death, if it appears thinkable as death of drive, should be understood, more radically, as the risk, to use Bion's expression, of the impossibility of activating an exchange between two terrorized individuals.

And that is how I found myself, slowly, realising how much I spoke to Ludovico, in an attempt to combat boredom, the feeling of an affect vacuum, coldness, uselessness of the analytic work, and of how this recounting of stories, tentative attempts at creating a connection, fragments of conjunction, expressions of acknowledgement of deep sensations where I thought I glimpsed them, were perhaps what enabled remaining alive. We could describe the set of analytic movements which occurred in

-the course of this treatment as an attempt not to make -the field of experience (which in these cases is necessarily reduced to past experience, as any future is invalidated) coincide with the horizon of expectation which any movement of desire necessarily introduces. The coincidence between the two dimensions obliges the word to become the witness of the already written history, and the gapbetween them introduces the possible. Incidentally, I recall that this was why Aristotle considered poetry superior to history, as the latter describes what occurred, while the former introduces what is possible.

From one session to another, when too much time elapses between them, Ludovico, the patient that I have chosen to represent a vast area of clinical phenomena «dies», and comes back depressed, lifeless, expressing awish to take his own life. I start to say something again, after silence has reigned for a while. I have learned that we must first stay in this area, live together through the discomfort and the solitude, the feeling that what we are doing is useless, of impotence before the terror of his childhood, and the defensive fragmentation of all emotional contact, before being able to re-emerge and utter a word. Then, slowly, he ralliesand can look at me again. The most significant aspect is that if this happens for a number of sessions, that is, if I don't stop struggling with him, for him, if I manage to weave some threads, to take up again some parts of the dialogue, if I attempt to reflect with him on certain sensations felt, to listen to him and to ask for his opinion, then some sessions later I can keep quiet and wait for him to begin reflecting on something. Then he starts thinking again and, more rarely, runs the risk of abandoning his few explicative certainties and ventures, for some steps in a more authentic direction. At bottom, he himself is frightened by the weight of pain and devastation that grips him: he protects himself and at the same time protects the analyst from too rapid a contact with this hell.

Perhaps, at this level of psychic functioning, the free associations are the thoughts of the numerous therapists and their either rich or bareworlds; the affects are those felt by the analyst, demonstrating their not excessive dangerousness; the reflexivity is what the analyst allows, the autobiography becomes the history of his years of analysis and, therapist after therapist, association after association, he is able to keep himself alive. At the same time, however, a rhythm is produced (the rhythm of the sessions, of silence and words, of glances and the loss of them…), necessary for taking charge of repressed drives: a primary organization of his chaos. Indicating, thus, not only the importance of a model of symbolic functions which we offer to introjection, as much as, as Roussillon (2004) observed, a dimension which is a messenger of drive dynamics, offered in its capacity as «signification» of the emotional exchange, an indication of addressing oneself specifically to the other who is there with us. We may thus surmise that drive activity is not lacking in these patients, and in any case, if it were, why and in what way would they invest in analysis (even if at the same time the possibility of a dehumanizing investment appears evident), but

-rather what is lacking is the ability to understand and experience the «messenger» dimension of the drive, the ability to give andreceive meaning from the representational and affective exchanges which, once denied, tend as a consequence to disqualify those same drive exchanges! observe that McDougall came to the same conclusion when she wrote: «What do these patients cling to? I think that they find in the analytical situation the proof of the existence of the unconscious, of the Other Scene and that they can be thought about» (1993, 246).

Evidently, the quality of the drive is reduced to its roughest state, that is to say to a perceptive dimension which would risk breaking heavily into the subject's psychic life, without any filter. It is therefore in this sense that the word which is able to take on board the «perceptive» without being upset by it, rather, on the contrary, is enriched by it, the word in its poetic capacity, is fundamentally absent and appears a bare, «ordinary» word, tending to a minimal exchange of information. A word, precisely, without the Other Scene.

We may therefore consider that affect-signal disappears, leaving in its stead only automatic-affect, or traumatic affect, and therefore every experience risks plummeting the subject towards a condition of disruptionand fracture of his being. This determines the psychic phobia construction process in which everything that rises to the value of «exchange» becomes for this reason a harbinger of catastrophe, determining a defensive manner in which the connections are sterilized at every level and in which the references to a double meaning of language are excessively feared, in a process in which the identical, the memory, is repeated in spite of any attempt to introduce otherness (Balsamo, 2011b).

The analytic work attempts to construct a further, other, time, a «fifth season» according to Pontalis (1997), a time starting from which, alongside the memories, an autobiography can be rendered.

The problem consists, however, in the difficulty of passing from a memory to an autobiography, of flexing the lumpof the real, melting it from its imposing itself as destiny, introducing a migration of meaning, the poetic within the fascism of language (breaking the belief in the unicity of meaning), as Barthes observed (1978).

From a certain point of view, this is the problem which was played out immediately in the dilemma between Freud and Fliess concerning the interpretation of the psychic, as the latter considered the associations of Freud's patients to be overly «witty», or we may say, too free, but which were already rejected by Breuer (ref. the Preliminary Communication in Studies On Hysteria) who opined that these ridiculous plays on words could onlyexist in severe hysteria. Between absolute determinism in which everything has a great weight (from one's name to one's date of birth, to the duration of the menstrual cycle) and determinism in which word plays, jokes, free association and doing things with words reigned supreme. Now, an issue which seems relevant to me is the possibility, in analysis, of introducing a linguistic gap, the

-introduction of a variation in the timelessness of primordial language, where words are irremediable, said once and for all, and to a large extent untranslatable. It is in any event clear that language, in its

representative/perceptive capacity, as a transformative tool, may be totally ineffective.

Therefore we should reformulate a better description than the one previously put forward: that of an analytic work characterized by more space being given to the spoken word. It is certainly true, given the assumption that if in clinical work on neurosis the representational plain is deemed established, and the patient is the junction of complex auto-interpretations, in a clinical situation lacking the pleasure principle, subjective assertion (from which stem the frequency of acting outand risk behaviours or, in other psychic situations, of frozen life plans), the spoken word seems aimed at avoiding different dimensions, the risk of contacting perceptions, affective states and bodily traces. At the same time, exactly in those cases, the analyst's word is more activated to address the processes of psychic emptying or

desertification.

What certainly appears different is the type and the plan of the work of working through. While I do not have the time, here, to deal with this aspect, it would appear interesting to refer to a work by Roussillon (2008), in which he examines the various types of working through relating to clinical material and the type of patient that we have in therapy and the need, in cases such as the one described by me here, not only to represent and depictthe psychic raw material (which coincides to a large extent with what I outlined of my attempt to construct possible stories and narratives as an anchor for destructive untying and the feeling of emptiness caused by abandonment), but especially to understand in whose name is performed this symbolization and what forms of subjective appropriation accompany the work of symbolization. This second aspect meets my observation on the role of parental enunciations, on their predictive/destinal value, on the conflict between silent attempts at subjectivation or which must remain secret for the same patient, and expropriation by ferocious and devouring imago. At the same time, this work of deconstruction involves the need, for the analyst, to reflect on his own parental aspects, whether worked through or not, or on the obligation to symbolize. By this term, I mean the transformative directionality which the analytic tool necessarily proposes, in its attempt to re-weave the links with the Other Scene and to put forward new meanings. The risk, clearly, is to drive the patient to a potentially unbearable confrontation with split elements, or with the radical sense of vacuum which would emerge from the abandonment of the persecutory characteristic of an object with which he/she engages a fight and which in any event provides him with a dialogic support. Paradoxically, a situation of this type risks imposing new parental violence, an issue which Roussillon attempted to address through the concept of transitionalization of the superego (acknowledgement of the non-ego inherent to psychic construction, or, if one wishes, of alienating identifications), and which I personally translate as the analyst's willingness to allow

-himself to be «deconstructed» by the patient, as the ability to search for buried perceptiveness, and for the treatment, howevercoarseit may be, of drives. This is an important aspect, but it is not the only one: I am thinking of the establishing of those feelings of restriction (the limits of one's fluctuating attention, malaise in the use of language, or the obligation to speak, to be in a certain way during sessions, etc.), or of the fear of serious consequences which capture the analyst if he attempts to cross a certain threshold. These are all aspects which end up defining the type of transference in operation as an «upside down transference», a transference, that is, in which the patient does not express his experiences but rather imposes them on the other, obliging the analyst to experience them in his place.

And yet, if psychotherapy is a game that must be learned, as Winnicott declared, why should the same not hold true for life? «I wanted to speak about something; I have come to the conclusion that I find what you told me last time to be partially true» said Ludovico. «That already seems like a lot to me», I reply, and he laughs. Facing the tragic and the unchangeable, facing the terror of statements, where is one to seek the subject, who must be hiding somewhere? I learned from this patient that a look, a smile, a slight grimace (in a maximum amplification of attention and in an erotic combat which libidinizes him) are the means through which unthinkable thoughts take shape and indicate their existence. Affects to be able to regain, undoubtedly through long deviations: in order not to be destructive, or a new imposition of an identity code, the affect experience cannot be the result of a deciphering of his states, but must first pass through me to show him that the food I am offering is not poisoned. We may say that I must taste the affect first. The means of expression that I adopt most frequently is: «this puts me in mind of … what do you think?». At the same time, however, these experiences signal states of being to be found, searched for, or discovered, in the face of the belief that everything is without life. It appears that forms of life are contained even where life as it is commonly known appears impossible. And, at bottom, does this discovery not leave us feeling less alone?

Summary and Key Words

The following paper explores the construction of the poetic within the word and its being missing in many clinical situations, which the author defines as «borderline states», characterized by the modification of basic parameters of analytic treatment. The absence of the poetic accounts for the necessity of a monosemic language, adhering to the thing, and the cancellation of all that could lead back to the «Other Scene», in the service of avoiding a re-encounter with traces of traumatically perceived or destroying experiences, of representative difficulties. The aim of analysis, that of reintroducing the poetic through the fundamental rule, is severely tested in these cases, and its refinding/construction through the search for the translating-subjectival dimensions that exist in spite of every condition, is hypothesized. Finally, the risk of symbolizing imposition present in these situations is described.

KEYWORDS: Language, poetic, borderline states, subjectivization, word.

LE DOMAINE DU «POÉTIQUE» DANS LES SITUATIONS LIMITES DE LA CURE ANALYTIQUE. Le travail suivant explore la constitution du poétique dans la parole et son absence dans de nombreuses situations cliniques que l'auteur appelle «situations limites», caractérisées par la modification des paramètres de base du traitement analytique. L'absence du poétique témoigne de la nécessité d'un langage monosémique, attaché à la chose, de la suppression de tout ce qui pourrait renvoyer à l'«Autre Scène», afin d'éviter la rencontre avec des traces et des expériences perceptives traumatiques ou destructrices, des difficultés représentatives. Le but de l'analyse, celui de réintroduire le poétique à travers la règle fondamentale, est durement mis à l'épreuve dans ces cas, et on supposé sa

redécouverte/constitution à travers la recherche de toutes ces dimensions traductives-subjectuelles qui existent en dépit de toute condition. Est enfin décrit le risque d'imposition symbolisante présent dans ces situations.

MOTS-CLÉS: Langue, parole, poétique, situations limites, subjectivation.

EL CAMPO DE «LO POÉTICO» EN LAS SITUACIONES LÍMITE DEL TRATAMIENTO ANALÍTICO. El presente trabajo explora como se constituye lo poético en la palabra, así como su carencia en múltiples situaciones clínicas que el Autor define «situaciones límite», porque se caracterizan por la modificación de los parámetros fundamentales de la terapia analítica. La ausencia de lo poético hace que sea necesario un lenguaje de un solo significado, adherente a la cosa, y que se cancele todo lo que pueda evocar a la «Otra Escena», con el fin de evitar encontrar de nuevo huellas y experiencias perceptivas traumáticas o destructivas de esas dificultades. En estos casos se pone a dura prueba la finalidad del análisis, es decir reintroducir lo poético por medio de la regla fundamental, entonces se supone su re-constitución, buscando todas esas dimensiones traductor- subjetivas que existen, a pesar de cada condición. Se describe en fin el riesgo de una imposición simbolizante presente en tales situaciones.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Lengua, palabra, poético, simbolización, situaciones límite.

DAS FELD DES «POETISCHEN» IN GRENZSITUATIONEN DER ANALYTISCHEN BEHANDLUNG. Diese Arbeit erforscht die Entstehung des Poetischen in den Worten und das Nicht-Vorhandensein in vielen klinischen Situationen, die der Autor als «Grenzsituationen» definiert und die eine Veränderung der grundlegenden Maßstäbe der analytischen Behandlung bedingen. Das Nicht-Vorhandensein des Poetischen bedeutet die Notwendigkeit einer monosemen, sachnahen Sprache, die Löschung von Allem, was zur «Anderen Szene» zurückführen könnte, um einen wiederholten Kontakt mit traumatischen oder zerstörerischen Spuren und

Wahrnehmungserfahrungen von Darstellungsschwierigkeiten zu vermeiden. Das Ziel der Analyse, d.h. das Poetische anhand der Grundregeln einzuführen, wird in diesen Fällen auf die Probe gestellt; das Wiederfinden/Bildung kann durch die Suche aller übersetzenden-subjektiven Dimensionen erreicht werden. Der Autor beschreibt außerdem das Risiko des symbolisierenden Zwangs in diesen Situationen.

SCHLÜSSELWÖRTER: Grenzsituationen, Poetisch, Sprache, Subjektivierung, Wörter.

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-Article Citation

[Who Cited This?]

Balsamo, M. (2015). The Area of the «Poetic» in Borderline States. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 9:51-69