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To Feel in My Flesh: Receptivity, Resonance, Representation, and The Beta Screen
11318 Beacon Street, #8 Brookline, MA 02446.
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
|December 14, 2023
Summary
This study explores how seemingly destructive patient behaviors may communicate unmet emotional needs. It suggests these "unrepresented" unconscious expressions are pleas for help, offering new insights into psychoanalytic theory.
Area of Science:
- Psychoanalytic theory
- Psychology
- Psychotherapy
Background:
- Language limitations in describing human emotional experience.
- Need to expand psychoanalytic theory beyond neurosis.
- Bion's concept of the beta screen.
Purpose of the Study:
- To expand psychoanalytic theory for understanding unrepresented mental life.
- To explore communication within the unstructured unconscious.
- To identify communicative meaning in seemingly destructive patient behaviors.
Main Methods:
- Revisiting Bion's early writings on the beta screen.
- Extending conclusions about communication from the psychotic mind.
- Analyzing unconscious evocation of emotions in the object.
Main Results:
- The unstructured unconscious may contain potentially communicative meaning.
- Unconscious emotional evocations can be a plea for intersubjective regulatory assistance (alpha function).
- Destructive, resistant, and oppositional behaviors may encrypt these pleas.
Conclusions:
- Psychoanalytic theory can be expanded to address the unrepresented unconscious.
- Understanding these "mute pleas" is crucial for therapeutic intervention.
- Even challenging patient behaviors may hold encrypted communicative meaning.
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