Witnessing and Psychoanalysis: As If It Never Happened
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : October 2023
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 152
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 97280
- ISBN 13 : 9781032564746
- ISBN 10 : 1032564741
Also by Philippe Refabert
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Witnessing and Psychoanalysis intertwines aspects of the history of psychoanalysis with the development of Philippe Réfabert’s own thinking and clinical practice.
Réfabert’s work invites analysts to reflect on the inception of psychic life. The author argues for a revisioning of drive theory and reflects on the psychic functioning of the analyst in the session. Réfabert forces the analyst to see the necessity of standing witness to acts left unacknowledged. In his view, in analysis witnessing is crucial.
With case material from the author’s practice throughout, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training.
Reviews and Endorsements
Witnessing and Psychoanalysis explores the silent zones of the foundation of being. With the support of writers like Melville, Hölderlin, Kafka and Celan, this investigation takes the reader to the boundaries of the gap created in the psyche by trauma. Réfabert goes beyond the Winnicottian ‘mirror’; he helps us to rethink the negative from the perspective of a parental psychic matrix. The author shows how the blunted zones of this matrix and the gaps created by trauma are compensated by the construction of a fetish or a scenario used as a substitute mirror serving to reflect a man or a woman wandering the earth without a shadow. This collection of essays is an extraordinary source of inspiration for clinicians, psychoanalysts, theoreticians and literary critics.
Carlo Bonomi
Philippe Réfabert’s book Witnessing and Psychoanalysis takes the reader on a journey beyond the usual references of mainstream psychoanalysis and proposes concepts such as ‘soul murder’, ‘paradoxical foundation’ and ‘trace of death’ as tools for the analyst in his work. ‘Soul murder’ also characterises patients who experienced extreme trauma, and who challenge the analyst to work with muted portions of his psyche of which he is unaware. Starting from the author’s efforts to free himself from institutional constraints and become an analyst for such patients, the book offers a wealth of clinical examples, showing, for example, how a child can be expected to animate a mortally wounded mother, a situation left unacknowledged for lack of a witness. Réfabert’s proposed paradigm for psychoanalysis in such cases is enlightened by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which summons the analyst to climb on the stage in order to be present on the side of the patient, to witness and create authorship for matters which have been thrown into nonexistence. I strongly recommend the reading of this book, which constitutes a landmark for psychoanalysis in our era of catastrophic events with their resulting traumas.
Françoise Davoine
Table of Contents
Part I - About the Originary
1. About a Limit Not Given at the Origin
2. A Transitional Psychic Matrix
3. Maternal Donation and the Phallus
4. Rhythmic Concertation and Its Disruptions
5. On Expulsion
Part II - On Witnessing
6. A Character, an Author, an Actor
7. Near the Originary, Where the Breath Fails
8. The Theory of Hysteria Hindered by the Absence of a Witness
9. The Witness: Subject of Psychoanalysis
10. In the Crevice of Time
11. Bearing the Other: The Two-Stage Birth of Psychoanalysis
12. Contribution to a Discussion on Bion’s Work
About the Author(s)
Philippe Réfabert obtained his medical degree in 1962 and after working as on-staff doctor in psychiatric hospitals between 1962 and 1966 set up private practice as a psychoanalyst in 1967. Between 1963 and 1973 he was a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, and subsequently became a member of the College of Psychoanalysts and the Fédération des Ateliers de Psychanalyse. He served as President of the latter between 1991 and 1992. He is also a prolific author, known for his work on the first years of the psychoanalytic movement, and particularly on Freud’s relationship with Fliess, Jung, and Ferenczi. He has led seminars and published articles on psychoanalytic practice, epistemology, analytic commitment, memory and forgetting, and analytic procedure. He is currently leading a workshop on the theme of 'Giving Time', and preparing a book on this primal paradoxical endowment. In this endeavour, he makes use of his clinical experience, and of the light and shadow found in the works of poets like Fernando Pessoa and Paul Celan.
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