Main description:

This book is recommended to psychoanalysts and therapists interested in the analytical technique, and particularly that work with patients who have deficits in their symbolization capacity. It presents studies of technical aspects of the analytical process with patients who are difficult to reach.

Collusions named 'chronic enactments' show that the analytic dyad cannot dream and the analytical field is paralyzed without the analyst perceiving it. Chronic enactments are undone through unconscious acts or behaviours that threaten to destroy the analytical process: behaviours that are named 'acute enactments'. The thorough study of these enactments show that they take the dyad to an awareness of the discrimination between self and object and re-establish the capacity to dream. It is demonstrated that this occurs in an attenuated traumatic form, revealing in the analytical field the externalization of primitive non-dreamed traumas.

Clinical, artistic, and mythical models are part of the discussion. The emphasis on clinical aspects allows readers to use different theories to consider the clinical facts. The clinical theories used by the author are mostly post-Kleinian and Bionian.

Contents:

PREFACE TO ENGLISH EDITION

PREFACE TO BRAZILIAN EDITION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE The analytic field and dream-for-two

CHAPTER TWO Dreaming non-dreamed dreams

CHAPTER THREE The theater of dreaming

CHAPTER FOUR Non-dream and enactment

CHAPTER FIVE Symbolizing traumas: acute enactment

CHAPTER SIX From bastion to enactment: intersubjective models

CHAPTER SEVEN Enactment and implicit alpha-function in the analysis of borderline configurations

CHAPTER EIGHT Dreaming bizarre objects and early traumas: the continuum dream <-> non-dream continuum

CHAPTER NINE What happens before and after acute enactment: the validation of clinical facts

CHAPTER TEN When the analyst becomes stupid; between Narcissus and Oedipus

CHAPTER ELEVEN Oedipus, Tiresias and the Sphinx: from non-dream to transformations into dreams