Psychopathology and Character. Psychoanalysis in the Body and the Body in Psychoanalysis. Reichian Analysis

By Genovino Ferri and Giuseppe Cimini

From the history of Reichian Analysis, through its most recent developments to its unrivalled perception of the central importance of the therapeutic setting.
This new book by Genovino Ferri and Giuseppe Cimini abundantly brings Wilhelm Reich’s psychoanalytical intuition to life, adding new, illuminating, translatable connections to that inextricable, living link between psychoanalysis and the body:
- The Arrow of Evolutive Time (which the authors, drawing on the Theory of Complexity, define as being Negentropic)
- The Stages of Development based on clear biological boundaries
- The Object Relationships with the partial object of that time
­The Bodily Segments, or Levels, which are marked by the Imprintings of the object relationships of each stage of development
- The Character Traits (character = incised mark) which develop from them and, partially overlapping, are incorporated into patterns of behaviour
- Psychopathology made human and comprehensible by its Intelligent Sense.
A body which becomes psyche from its initial intrauterine appearance (a relationship between an “embryonal” body and a “partial” body), where the first pathologies have their origins.
A body which is always speaking and is thus always legible, can always be listened to and observed in its elementary and complex semiology and in its transformation into characterological types…
Every reader will be able to find their own body or parts of it.
The authors add a further startling discovery to the history of Reichian Analysis, the fundamental passages of which are described. This discovery will completely modify the therapeutic setting, or, rather, the interpretation of the patient-therapist “relationship” as a third presence, as a responsive, third living force.  It will create triangulation that can be expressed and will expand dia-logue to tria-logue, adding a new voice to research.
In “Psychopathology and Character, Reichian interpretation – psychoanalysis in the body and the body in psychoanalysis” every reader will be able to seek and find themselves. Feeling your body and connecting it to your knowledge will be sufficient, so letting knowledge and feeling converse. In this way we can all reach greater depths and new heights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alpes Editore
• Release date: May 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9788865315149

Book preview

www.alpesitalia.it

Foreword

From the history of Reichian Analysis, through its most recent developments to its unrivalled perception of the central importance of the therapeutic setting.

This new book by Genovino Ferri and Giuseppe Cimini abundantly brings Wilhelm Reich’s psychoanalytical intuition to life, adding new, illuminating, translatable connections to that inextricable, living link between psychoanalysis and the body:

•The Arrow of Evolutive Time (which the authors, drawing on the Theory of Complexity, define as being Negentropic)

•The Stages of Development based on clear biological boundaries

•The Object Relationships with the partial object of that time

•The Bodily Segments, or Levels, which are marked by the Imprintings of the object relationships of each stage of development

•The Character Traits (character = incised mark) which develop from them and, partially overlapping, are incorporated into patterns of behaviour

• Psychopathology made human and comprehensible by its Intelligent Sense.

A body which becomes psyche from its initial intrauterine appearance (a relationship between an embryonal body and a partial body), where the first pathologies have their origins.

A body which is always speaking and is thus always legible, can always be listened to and observed in its elementary and complex semiology and in its transformation into characterological types…

Every reader will be able to find their own body or parts of it.

The authors add a further startling discovery to the history of Reichian Analysis, the fundamental passages of which are described. This discovery will completely modify the therapeutic setting, or, rather, the interpretation of the patient-therapist relationship as a third presence, as a responsive, third living force. It will create triangulation that can be expressed and will expand dia-logue to tria-logue, adding a new voice to research.

In Psychopathology and Character, Reichian interpretation – psychoanalysis in the body and the body in psychoanalysis every reader will be able to seek and find themselves. Feeling your body and connecting it to your knowledge will be sufficient, so letting knowledge and feeling converse. In this way we can all reach greater depths and new heights.

INTRODUCTION

Psychiatry, psychopathology, psychotherapy and psychology present a wide but fragmented range of ideas and practices. These not only foster numerous, often conflicting, opinions, but also encourage a largely fideistic approach. They formulate and develop paradigms that are not very clear, or that are ambiguous or polyvalent. This is because they have to exist in the world of science and, although they have been freed from mythology and from mystic philosophies, they are marked by their awareness of this immense, muddled potential which must be managed and may only be interpreted in terms of the methods of natural sciences with some inherent difficulty. This potential is linked to the distinctive nature of human events, which are unique and unrepeatable and which bear their own meaning because they belong to a unique and unrepeatable Self which is set into a context of interpersonal relationships.

The prognostic ability of this polymorphic world is firmly linked to the understanding of past experiences, be they events or other historically-significant things and is built from the individual and their story, from the society in which they live, from the environment and from their family and social relationships.

To what degree a particular methodology, based on these presuppositions, leads to real acquisition of awareness or has been superseded in its epistemological and clinical-therapeutic capacity, is an open question. We will only touch marginally on this.

The inter-relationships between these sensations, between these different ways of thinking and, consequently, ways of reacting and the attitudes and behaviour of society, of the authorities and of public health institutions has punctuated the scientific and social history of madness and of those seen as mad.

It is important to understand that every opinion and every position taken gives rise to pragmatic attitudes and that these influence the behaviour of care-providers, of those affected by (the internal suffering of) mental illness and of people in general.

The way to well-being is not the absence of illness, but rather it is genitality, which is the enjoyment of the greatest wellness of our optical mammalian beings; it is real human comparison, no longer blocked in paranoid positions; it is the opportunity to develop our evolutive potential; it is living in a society of true communication and true relationships.

Therefore we are looking to really make enriching communication and to provide an other translation of the person without forgetting our cultural history, which we could never do.

We will not forget the acquisition of models which we judge to be the most appropriate for interpreting past life experiences, which are, after all, the object of our work; similarly, we also believe that it is possible, in a bridge situation between old and new culture, to insert this missing joining-link, in what is a post-reichian, interpretative lesson, which thus takes its impetus from the ideas of W. Reich and moves autonomously on to other developments.

The aim of our work is, therefore, to make a novel contribution, amplifying perspectives and insinuating some doubt into a culture which already seems to be well on its way to, and has to contend with the noticeable danger of, feeding on self-reassuring certainties. We wish to stimulate an open discussion which, on a practical level, will have useful reverberations.

CHAPTER ONE: TENDENCIES IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Even today any serious approach to psychopathology cannot escape the necessity of clarifying the route taken to reach its present position. We cannot afford the luxury of dealing with our problems without involving a historical perspective, which explains why there are antinomies and paradoxes.

The prehistory of psychiatry can be identified in shamanic rituals, in Hippocratic priests activity, in Artemidoros’ interpretation of dreams, in the administering of hellebore, in the humours and in the temperaments, in the behaviour of the fortune-tellers and sorcerers, in the colourful apparitions of the purveyors of miraculous remedies in the market-places and in the faith in the supernatural and in other phenomena which are beyond common human understanding or experience. Douglas Guthrie [1] believes that the profession of healer is the most ancient in the development of society – in Trois Frères caves in France there is a cave painting, dating back to 15000 years before Christ, showing a witch doctor. He is wearing an animal skin and his limbs are painted with stripes. It is probable that medicine itself evolved from problems that lay on the boundary between physical and metaphysical – death and the spread of disease, which were surely associated with magic and or religion, rather than being seen as natural phenomena.

The Malleus Maleficarum by Sprenger and Kremer was perhaps the first text on psychopathology, though they would have been unaware of this, and, in particular, on the phenomenology of Hysteria. It is no less a part of the history of psychiatry than Freudian, existentialist or recent organicist thought.

The history of psychiatry is not merely a simple exercise in learning - it is rather a story of the dramatic suffering actually experienced in the mind and the body.

Therefore it is worth seeing how psychiatric and psychopathological thought has developed into its principal currents.

Its evolutive path has followed various lines, the first of which has led to the organicistic paradigm and to psychoanalytical metapsychology; a second line, characterised by idealistic historicism, has given rise to psychodynamic praxis and to phenomenological psychiatry; the final line was motivated by social historicism, from whose bosom socio-political currents have evolved.

Organicism

Biological-organicist psychiatry assumes that the cause of mental disorders should be sought within the organism. It was, in fact, based, at the beginning of its evolution, on the patterns derived from positivist thought in medicine during the first half of the last century. It was dominated by the epistemological return to the discoveries of Bayle, Alzheimer and Nissl on progressive paralysis. In Griesinger it found the most ardent supporter of the link between the biological condition of the encephalon and mental illness; a period of ingenuous biologism followed, the intentions of which would be isolating the symptom and reducing the symptoms observed to syndromes, mechanistic interpretation and cerebral localisation of the symptomatology and the exclusion of psychological factors in the etiopathogenesis of mental illnesses. [2]

This type of ideology, called paleopositivist by Borgna, confers the state of noxa primaria (primary injury) on biological damage. The reductionist view, which was implicit in Griesinger’s assertion that mental illnesses are diseases of the brain, dominates this perspective – the climate in which research was performed in this period is represented by the work of Wundt (nothing happens in our consciousness without being sensorially-based on specific determining factors); the correlations between psychic phenomena and the physiological anatomic substrate of the central nervous system represented the principal area of interest for researchers; by founding a branch of psychology which tended towards fragmentation of mental life into distinct elements which can be investigated individually (Griesinger), giving the idea that the basis of psychology as a science depended on reducing the language of psychological phenomenon to neuropathological language. The most notable consequence of the homologation of psychopathology and neuropathology was identifying the body as a privileged object for study – only the study of the body could supply answers to the questions about the nature and the essence of mental illness (Zilboorg).

Such a set-up required the appropriate correspondence of biological language on one side and of behavioural language on the other, which represented the keystone to building firm correlations between the two areas.

Classic psychopathology was born from this necessity with its need to describe psychopathological phenomena as objectively as possible. It was the time of accurate illustration of phenomena and of the classification of psychic facts, which were grouped as symptoms with common underlying connections and was an undertaking which the psychiatrists of the last century drew out over a long period (Hillman).

This naturalistic approach gave rise to the Kraepelinian classification system (based on the concept of a natural, single entity of illness which was morbid and well-defined, with precise characteristics for the elapsed prognosis and etiopathogenesis), to classification by category and by dimension and to other systems of classification by syndrome.

Over time techniques have been refined which have led to other programmes of biological research, which have, in turn, led to the biological model being structured ever more scientifically. Thus, as Andreoli notes, there is:

• A genetic hypothesis postulating the transmission of mental illness by a genic mechanism, the conceptual basis for which is demonstrated by the greater incidence of mental illnesses in particular family groups, but with the serious limitation that it is impossible to mark a distinct boundary between what is hereditary and what is produced by the environment.

• A biochemical hypothesis which indicates that the factor responsible for psychopathological disorders is in alterations to cerebral neuromediators

• A neurophysiological hypothesis which involves the functioning of the Central Nervous System and considers some particular sets of conditions capable of explaining psychopathological symptomatology.

However the positivist optimism generated by the idea of having found the model of mental illness, soon had to face up to the reality of not having reliable semiotic models (biological and clinical-nosographic) to make use of.

Psychodynamic comprehension

This second paradigm, whose paternity is attributed to Freud, can be considered to have originated from psychopathological naturalism, at least in its metapsychological aspects.

Generally speaking, psychodynamic refers to a particular interpretation of psychopathology, in which behaviour is determined by what are essentially subconscious dynamisms. Thus represented a true psychiatric revolution (Zilboorg), thanks to which a model began to appear in which the generation of mental illness was not attributed to a rigid deterministic/physical pattern, but rather to a concept of purely psychological causality. [2] The paradoxical aspect is that the disposition of the father of psychoanalysis, in the cultural panorama of his time, developed from his academic background, which had been dedicated to the search for a means to interpret the nature of man; this is attested to by the Project for a Scientific Psychology, his attempt to extrapolate from the natural world, through the utopia of physiological psychology, a direct correlation between physical and mental processes [3]. And, on the other hand, Freud was aware of Herbart and Griesinger’s realism. In this way, the results of the long journey, which had begun in ancient times, began to take shape as a science in the period covering the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was the contributions of men like Charcot, Janet, Liebault and Breuer, who, having understood the importance of the deep origins of behaviour, supplied Freud with the key to his interpretation. [4]

The concept of psychic life, derived from psychodynamic thought, above and beyond the sometimes contrasting interpretations of the various schools (Freudian, Junghian, Kleinian, Reichian etc.), has a common denominator which Tedeschi identifies in the principal action of the unconscious as the cause of psychopathological symptomatology, in the conscious maturing of the personality, in the fact that healing cannot be measured exclusively by having overcome the symptomatology and in the analysis of the transference as part of the therapeutic technique.

In this way the behaviour manifested by an individual is determined by an interrelationship of forces, awareness of which is, at times, only partial. Psychopathological problems cannot therefore be understood on the basis of experience as they are presented to the conscious mind, but only by integrating the activities of the conscious psyche (thoughts, representations, thymic arrangement) with those components which we are not consciously aware of, that is to say the irrational, primordial and primitive, as well as the instinctive and symbolic.

In synthesis the common characteristics of dynamic-energetic thought are:

• The existence of a conscious/unconscious antinomy, in which the unconscious is not seen as a pure diametrically opposite aspect of the structure of the conscious mind, but rather as an active function, which determines its own distinct ways of acting.

• Particular importance is given to children’s phantasmal relationships.

• The symptomatology is derived from a dynamic compromise, triggered by a conflictual situation connected to particular moments in the biopsychic evolution of the individual.

• The use of a precise therapeutic technique.

Rossini suggests that Freud’s success was in amplifying the dimensions of man’s psychic personality when he recognised that his psychic world is not enclosed only within the boundaries of reason and of conscious volition of the Ego, but that it is also based upon activities outside our conscious, on a basis of unconscious dynamisms where the irrational, the primitive, the repressed and the forgotten converge.

Phenomenology

The charter of phenomenological thought is about comprehension, about an understanding which originates from the attitude adopted in the inter-human relationship with the person being examined [5] and which seeks to favour moving the medic’s role from gnostic to practical [6] – in fact the phenomenological approach has human experience [7] as a particular area of study, above and beyond the polysemous fragmentation of the various different approaches.

Behind this particular approach, in which philosophical thought is integrated with psychiatric intervention [8], we should remember Minkowski’s structural-intuitionist position. His view, in the light of Husserlian and Heideggerian acquisitions, leads to a synthetic vision of psychiatry, psychopathology and philosophy. There is also Binswanger’s idea of the category of possibility as a fundamental radical of humans and co-existence (mit-dasein) in the patterns of love, of friendship, of aggressiveness and so on. And then there is Jaspers.

We should spend longer on Jaspersian phenomenology – the psychopathological assumptions which are derived from his reasoning still represent the basis for many of the theoretical concepts of psychiatry.

In his work General Psychopathology [9] he defines phenomenology as what "has the task of making the mental states which the patients actually experience (Erleben) present and evident, observing them in their affinities, to define them and to distinguish them as clearly as possible, giving them precise denominations.

The core of Jaspers theory is constituted by the notion of comprehensibility – its importance is on one hand technical, for ordering the concepts of neuroses, of reactions to events and of the definitions of psychoses. On the other hand it is also culturally relevant as it offers itself as a separator between normality and madness.

Comprehensibility therefore means [9] actualizing and objectifying psychic qualities and grasping subjective experiences as if from within. However it also means putting yourself in the other’s position, understanding the psychic relationships, isolating and linking individual psychic phenomena in a chain of motivations, so as to make the patient’s behaviour credible in terms of our own experience... Thus, to comprehend the relationship between psychic facts, between antecedents and successive events intuitively and, so to speak, immediately. [10]

On the borders of comprehensibility are the territories of the Unconscious and the Process.

The process is something completely new bursting in, which constitutes a permanent alteration to the psychic life it interrupts – this is what determines the formation of the primary symptoms of psychoses. In itself it is a non-sense compared to the usual meaning of our understanding, (10) opening the door to the introduction of something extraneous into the complex of our psychological existence. It is this something that led Weitbrecht to say that schizophrenia, the epitome of a psychotic process, proceeds fatally from biological depths, which are psychologically inaccessible and are still somatologically unexplained.

However much it may be obscure, rich in potential and governed by its own rules, the unconscious is not structured like a region in as much as it is the negative of the conscious, which it opposes as an antithesis. The conscious is inner life, while the extra-conscious does not have this dimension. The conscious is objective, it is knowing something and, as such, it opposes the unconscious, which is pure feeling and does not objectualise anything. The conscious is self-reflection, consciousness of oneself, while the unconscious denies every opportunity for explicit knowledge. [10]

It is from here that the negativity of the my-other, my incomprehensibility, my arcane dark side and, especially, my inaccessible side is generated. It is the sentence without appeal of psychoanalysis.

Social psychiatry

This current of thought has not experienced unequivocal elaboration either – the term socio-psychiatry designates both the theoretical study seeking to understand the relationship between society and mental illness and, in particular, the evaluation of the pathogenic action of the environment, [11] and, more radically, a vision of the world that is born from the laceration that the crisis in traditional models of normality represents and that identifies difficulty as the basis and the space upon which to build new models for analysis, through political means and instruments (Jervis). [12] Therefore mental illness is reduced to a number, which is an indicator of the incidence and prevalence of mental illness, to which the blame for causing damage to society and its productive mechanisms is attributed.

The marginality and the problematic nature of psychopathological conditions provoke reactions from the sane part of society – the disturbing element assumes the role and status of madman and is treated accordingly. In this way psychiatric praxis, no longer derived from the principles of care, takes on the connotations of repression and intolerance.

Although the language it uses seems radical, the merit of social psychiatry lies in having started the debate which led to the progressive opening of psychiatric hospitals, in contributing to the elaboration of the theory regarding the anti-therapeutic effect of segregating structures [2] and, additionally, in having discovered the political potential of psychopathology itself and its social relevance.

Consideration

From this quick, incomplete, panoramic view of the state of the art of psypathology and psychiatry, you can draw the impression of the enormous riches in its field of study and application and, at the same time, of its inevitable epistemological weakness. [13]

Psychiatry is the science of the human – for the psychiatrist, especially when working with psychotics, the reality of life is what is shown by its smells, its colours, instincts, passions and anxieties. It is firmly rooted in the theatre of drama between man, world and God [14].

Despite this it still has to practice a reduction in two of the dimensions of this complex universe, within a Cartesian machine in which it is seeking, or illuding itself that it is seeking, order and monotonous predictability. Monotony would also be warm and comfortable. This bi-dimensionality resembles that of a photographic image; its noema is the same - "it