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>Now, Look here...<
(2009)
>Schauen Sie, hier...<
(2009)
A Crucial Encounter
(2009)
There are patients whose outstanding feature is a particular difficulty in >communicating with themselves.< According to Bion, who reconceptualized Freud's theory, all of us have in our inner world the potential for both producing and blocking alpha-transformations. When they are blocked, beta-elements are formed, which are unable to generate thought. Our capacity to think and to think >ourselves< depends exclusively on alpha-elements. Patients suffering from problems derived from a compensated >structural mental void< are unable to think. Following Bion, the >non-edited< would, generally speaking, be one of the facts that condition the formation of beta-elements. The production of beta-elements transforms these personalities into >functional illiterates.< To what extent can we ignore the >novelties< that these patients present us with through the production of beta-elements and >bizarre objects<? I wonder whether the concepts of >repetition< and >re-edition,< as they are currently used in the clinical process, are not actually casting a shadow over our minds, thus thwarting our ability to assess the total dimension of this >functional illiterate< condition. The analyst's mind can be the first link in a patient's chain of unthinkable thoughts: (1) repetition; (2) embryonic thoughts; (3) the non-edited; (4) structural mental void; (5) functional illiterate; and (6) mental abortions.
This short paper concentrates on three powerful ideas introduced by three important theorists, namely, Merton’s interpretation of anomie in America, Fromm’s critical aesthetics regarding man’s consciousness in relation to nature, and finally Du Bois’ concept of the >racial wage< (Lemert, 2004, pp. 218-240). Those theories are then applied to the Japanese phenomenon of the <compensated date< and the Thai >sex industry<.
Awakening the Patient
(2009)