Ferenczi and Literature - Trauma and Imagination in the Psychoanalytic Clinic

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the psychoanalytic clinic of trauma and imagination. Trauma will be defined, among other things, as the situation in which the subject loses their position as the author of their own story. Imagination, in turn, will be employed as an umbrella concept that articulates theoretical elements from psychoanalysis and philosophy to describe a way of receiving the productions of the traumatic field in the clinic in order to (re)construct the capacity to speak of oneself lost in trauma. In the field of psychoanalysis, the idea of imagination proposed in this work is based on the notions of reconstruction and construction, employed, respectively, by Ferenczi and Freud as strategies to manage so-called difficult patients. Within the scope of philosophy, imagination draws inspiration from a Kantian proposition regarding imagination, as well as dialogues with theories of virtuality, based on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, David Lapoujade, and Pierre Lévy, in order to recognize the therapeutic efficacy of different (though not mutually exclusive) expressive modes of verbal language.