1st Edition
The Work of Psychic Figurability Mental States Without Representation
The majority of psychoanalysts today agree that the analytic setting faces them daily with certain aspects of their work for which the answers provided by an analytic theory centred exclusively on the notion of representation prove insufficient.
On the basis of their experience of analytic practice and illustrated by fascinating clinical material, César and Sára Botella set out to address what they call the work of figurability as a way of outlining the passage from the unrepresentable to the representational. They develop a conception of psychic functioning, which is essentially grounded in the inseparability of the negative, trauma, and the emergence of intelligibility, and describe the analyst's work of figurability arising from the formal regression of his thinking during the session, which proves to be the best and perhaps the only means of access to this state beyond the mnemic trace which is memory without recollection.
The Work of Psychic Figurability argues that taking this work into consideration at the heart of the theory of practice is indispensable. Without this, the analytic process is too often in danger of slipping into interminable analyses, into negative therapeutic reactions, or indeed, into disappointing successive analyses.
Biography
César Botella and Sára Botella are child and adult psychoanalysts in private practice. They are training analysts at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, and in 1983 received the International Price Maurice Bouvet for their article 'On the auto-erotic deficiency of the paranoïa'.
"...the Botellas are ... astute clinicians and their book is illustrated with clinical vignettes and case examples from adult and child analyses. While they may reason at a metapsychological level of complex theoretical and philosophical abstraction, they repeatedly return to the clinical moment to illustrate their main thesis: that a theory of psychoanalysis and mental functioning that assumes the capacity for representation and an intact, symbolizing ego is insufficient to account for the clinical phenomena and therapeutic exigencies encountered in an ordinary psychoanalytic practice! What they insist is needed instead is a theory capable of addressing and accounting for what Michael Parsons, in his very helpful introduction to the English language edition, describes as "that aspect of experience which will not 'go into words' because it will not, so to speak, 'go into thought' in the first place." (p. xvii).
"Put another way, the Botellas are attempting to create language and theory to describe the action of converting proto-elements of thought and feeling into something that is mentalizable and potentially articulatable and representable." - Howard B Levine, Psychoanalytic Quarterly