The Dread of Falling – Between Breaking One's Back and Breaking Through: Commentary on Franco Borgogno's >On the Patient's Becoming an Individual<

  • The title of this paper employs a pun (>not< and >knot<) to emphasize that a relational (k)not negates truly intersubjective dialogue by shutting down the spaces, between and within persons, for mentalization, reflective functioning, genuine affect, and negotiation. In treatment, relational (k)nots appear as repetitions that – unlike Russell's >crunch,< with its intensities of crisis – coerce states of noninvolvement between patient and analyst. Persistent relational notting produces a crisis of mutual detachment. After offering in this paper a developmental perspective on the etiology of relational (k)nots based on parental failure to mentalize the child's separate subjectivity, I offer an extended clinical vignette to illustrate notting and subsequent disengagement between patient and analyst, and I suggest potential analytic approaches to untying the (k)not.

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Metadaten
Author:Barbara Pizer
Parent Title (English):Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 171-192.
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2003
Release Date:2017/11/20
Format:xerox upon request / Fotokopie auf Anfrage
IdNo:Pizer_B_2003
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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