There are patients who appear quite ordinary during the course of the initial consultations and of the

first months of the analysis, at least on the surface.

They complain about being depressed, or anxious, unsatisfied with their lives, with their

relationships or with their jobs. They tell a story which appears quite ordinary as well. There are no

abuses, no tragic losses, no dramatic deaths. However, if we listen carefully to what they say we

realize quite soon that something is out of tune.

There are small discrepancies, inconsistencies, incomprehensible dissonances. Sometimes you

simply cannot understand the relationship between the normal, biographically detailed story which

is told and the deep and repeated unhappiness resulting from it. Sometimes you cannot explain the

disproportion between the absolutely normal events they tell and the persistent inability to lead a

satisfactory life. The traumatophilic2 character of the events they describe is intriguing because it

doesn’t offer a logical explanation. Unlike other patients, these patients do not tell nor present a

particularly difficult or wearying family context.

For a while, in the beginning, the analysis seems to develop in a simple and natural way. Patients

come willingly, they have gladly made room for the sessions, both in the inner and in the external

world. They soon acknowledge a sense of immediate relief and well-being, and they are grateful

for it. Analysis seems to be oriented toward a natural and easy development.

Little by little, however, as soon as the analysis gets to the heart of the matter, we notice a few

uncommon, out of the ordinary elements, particularly remarkable in the counter transference.

In the transference-counter transference dynamics, we are met with the repetition of those extra–

ordinary protections (Mitrani, 2001), of those extraordinary defences set up at some point in their

life, when the awareness of the traumatic event would have been overwhelming for the maintenance

of the status-quo or for the psychic survival itself.

I want to describe here the development of an abnormal defensive relational barrier in some

patients. This extra-ordinary barrier is characterized by schizoid or maniacal defences and by the

constant and protracted misuse of splitting, projection, and denial. These defensive maneuvers start

only after the development of an intimate relationship with an object, a relationship which has often 

been avoided and from which they have often escaped to protect the object and themselves from a

possible breakdown.

Those defences are the answer to traumas sustained but not immediately perceived as such by the

patients and, what is worst, by the external environment. These traumas are characterized by

physical and emotional neglect, separation from the caregivers, repeated verbal violences and

abuses, protracted exposure to serious depressions, paranoid features or other major parental

pathologies (included serious and disabling phisical illnesses), continuing distorsions of the

emotional and cognitive competences by the primary objects and many others. These traumatic

experiences are less striking than the traumas characterized by physical or sexual abuse, or by the

exposure to dramatic violent events, and for this reason they developed with little acknowledgement

of their traumatic nature by the patient and, worst still, by the external environment. (Meares, 2000)

Sometimes these traumas occurred in periods of life when the traumatic experience was not

representable, that is when the explicit memory wasn’t yet structured. In this case we are dealing

with the emotional and affective memory, the implicit memory, which communicates its mnemic

images through the perceptive-receptive canals. At times the traumatic experiences started at a very

early stage of development, but then went on for a very long time and left clear memories in the

patient, who, however, cannot stand the exposure to such memories. Sometimes the traumatic

character of the experience completely escaped everybody’s notice and the suffering, or, better, the

defence from suffering developed mainly through the mechanisms of denial and splitting, early

primitive defences reactivated only for this purpose.

The aim of this work is to present, through some clinical material, the emergence of the traumatic

elements in the transference, that is their reactivation in the relationship with the analyst, which is a

prerequisite for those traumatic elements to be understood and transformed.

What differentiates those patients from others equally traumatized is the development of the

analysis in two movements: the first movement is focused on the reception and the comprehension

of more superficial factors, whereas the other is focused on deep traumatic elements. These

elements become accessible only after the development of an early stage of reception and exposure

to a constant and emotionally sympathetic setting, that is precisely what the analytic situation

should be. It is possible to differentiate the trasferencial and counter transferencial elements in the

analyic situation of the present from the experiences of the past only after the development of a

different relational model, characterized by attention, comprehension and, above all, a careful use of

time and space. I want to emphasize this last element, because a steady feature in all those patients

seems to have been a continuous unwarranted interference in their time and space.

If we think that we can reach such processes of transformation that can break the traumatophilic

chain only through the reactivation of the early traumatic experience in the transference, we must

pay careful attention to all the elements developed in the analysis, that is also to the

psychosensorial elements and generally speaking to the the extra-verbal moments and not only to

the verbal elements.

The deep work of the analysis with these patients should be carried out with careful attention to the

micro-phenomena, to the micro-fractures of time and space in the setting during the analytic hour.

Betty Joseph (1985) stresses that “If we work only with the part that is verbalised, we do not take

into account the object relationships being acted out in the transference…We need to understand the

patient’s current internal state in term of the total interpersonal situation the patient creates in the

transferernce with the analyst”.

Trauma

The history of psychoanalysis coincides with the theory of trauma. From Freud until today trauma

has always maintained a central position in understanding the psychic pain even in the different

theoretic positions. In this paper, following a theoretic line which starts from Freud and goes

through Ferenczi to more recent authors ((McDougall, 1982, 1989; Giaconia e Racalbuto, 1990) I

consider traumatic those events which cannot be integrated nor worked out, and which persist like

leaks in the continuum of mental functioning.

They remain like silent areas of the mind, and they damage both the thinking process and the very

thoughts, preventing the symbol formation. In these situations the body may become a

representational area and realize the concrete representation of primitive phantoms through

coenaesthetic perceptions.

Memory

The philosopher Paolo Rossi in his book “The past, the memory and the oblivion” (1991) says that

in the philosophical tradition, memory refers to a persistence, a reality somehow continuous and

untouched, whereas the reminiscence or recalling refers to the capability of retrieving something

that one had in the past and has forgotten. For Aristotle remembering implies a deliberate effort of

the conscious mind, an excavation or a voluntary search. Whereas for the Platonic tradition memory

is a form of knowledge connected to the true knowledge that the soul can reach.

So we have memory/ oblivion on one hand and remembrance /forgetfulness on the other. So we can

have memories which we will never remember and that nevertheless constitute the most intimate

and profound identity of the person. We know very well that patients in analysis will not necessarily

get to remember those events or traumatic experiences from which their symptoms or their pains

originate. Those past events may have happened before the development of the memory system

which is able to encode and retain the past experience in a way that can be represented, consciously

or unconsciously, as a story. Also Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection on time and memory (1998) is

helpful in suggesting the analyst to be considered as a historian whose work enables the patient to

acquire a historical consciousness of his unconscious.

Peter Fonagy (1999) underlines that : “The only way we can know what goes on in our patient’s

mind , what might have happened to them, is how they are with us in the transference…Therapeutic

action lies in the conscious elaboration of preconscious representations, principally through the

analyst attention to transference.”

During the course of an attentive and empathic analysis we can, in my view, restore the patient to a

good enough memory of the Self, even without the development of proper memories from his past.

The patient may testify to his experience, without being constantly forced to remember the

traumatic elements. Actually I do think that through the experience of the transference–counter

transference dynamics the analysis can restore the human beings to the dignity of their memory and

their witnessing, freeing them from persecutory recollections of the past or from the residual tracks

of those recollections.3

Transference and counter transference

As Freud emphasized in his early writings, transference is central in analytic work. He discovers

that the work of analysis revolves and depends upon the handlings of transference (1912) and this

statement remains for every analyst the basic element of any clinical experience with every patient.

Whatever are the troubles and the suffering of the patient, these must be reactivated in the

transference in order to be understood and transformed.

Following Freud’s lead, Melanie Klein (1952) further developed the analytic thinking about the

transference and proposed that the transference situation encompasses a whole constellation of past

experiences, emotions, defences, and object relations. For Melanie Klein and her followers the

transference is at the centre of a movement which goess from the past through the present time

toward the psychic change. Therefore transference is eminently the place of psychic change.

Betty Joseph (1989) for example takes into account all the minute shifts in transference, and stresses

the unconscious need for the patient to maintain a psychic equilibrium which resists his conscious

desire for psychic change. A constant setting facilitates this process of psychic change.

In the last few years in psychoanalytic literature special attention has been given to the analyst’s

subjectivity and to the influence of countertransference on the analysis. The attention previously

given to the intrapsychic level of the patient is now focused on the intrapsychic level of the

interaction between patient and analyst. (O’Shaughnessy, 1983).

Luciana Nissim Momigliano has been a creative and original interpreter of this school of thought in

Italy. In Shared Experience: the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1992) the dominant theme was the hope

that these two people in a room (the patient and the analyst) will be able to communicate with each

other and share their experience.

In this view countertransference is no longer considered a disturbing element in the analytic work,

a plain expression of the analyst’s difficulties or a pure product of the patient’s projective

identification, but rather a specific emotional context that originates from the encounter of that

patient with that analyst.

In every analytic treatment we meet some countertransferencial and transferencial somatic elements

that represent the Ps-D dialectic, and the narcissistic-object transference dialectic.

In this work I particularly insist on the sensory-somatic experiences as a privileged area of

transmission of those imperceptible elements of communication, whose reception and awarding of

meaning allow the analytic work to develop along paths that would remain otherwise unknown.

The concept of countertransference becomes quite amplified: we are dealing with the area defined

by Gaddini psycho sensory area, in which fantasies are expressed by means of bodily functioning.

Gaddini calls them fantasies in the body. “A primitive fantasy expressed in the body can hardly be

Lucy is 39 at the beginning of her analysis. She originates from a small town in Nporthern Italy,

where her family owns a farm and still lives in a big house. During the initial consultations Lucy

presents herself as a simple, naïve girl, rather depressed, disheartened by a clerical work of little

interest, with a narrow circle of friend. She doesn’t recall a particularly difficult or wearying story,

nor do I see anything suspicious in that sense .

Her father had died two years before. He was a rather authoritarian and aggressive figure especially

in the family context, but for a long time she’ll present him as a severe but fair man, basically good

and beloved by all family. The mother instead is presented from the very beginning as a weak

figure, querulous and complaining. She would often be sick and unable to react to the frequent

outbursts of anger of her husband and to his verbal and physical aggressions. Lucy is the rebellious

daughter who mostly incurs her father’s furies, especially because she demands more freedom and

independence. As an extreme concession she obtains to come and live in Milan to attend

University. She doesn’t say very much of the 20 years she has spent in Milan ever since, thus

suggesting a slight disillusion compared to the initial expectations.

For the first six months the analysis seems to develop quite well following the initial consultation’s

tracks. Lucy seems very interested in the functioning of the analysis, and extremely grateful for the

attention that her lonliness and depression at last can receive.

Then I slowly realize I have unexpected and incomprehensible fits of drowsiness during her

sessions. The sessions are at different time every day and I cannot understand the cause of my

drowsiness. I get to dread these sessions with Lucy, because I fall into a heavy sleepiness, a kind of

more and more incomprehensible black–out. In the meantime new and really bizarre elements of

her story sift through my numbness. Lucy is talking about her maternal grandmother, an almost

mythological figure, living representation of persecutory ghosts, who tells her stories of local

superstitions, of flower wreaths put on the windowsill to calm down the witches, of spells cast by

wizards and witches. Lucy is also often repeating: “She’s ugly! She’s ugly!” referring this time to

her paternal grandmother, that seems to embody a kind of witch too. I have trouble to disentangle

myself between old mountain legends, and present time fears, between phantasy and reality. I start

to suspect the presence of a delusional core in this patient, well hidden, but very well organized.

Little by little Lucy is able to describe the phenomena of physical depersonalization, of

coenaesthetic misperceptions, that assault her on the couch. She feels she is floating in the air, or

she is sticking to the couch, she feels she is petrified and cannot move, and I understand she is as

terrified as I am.

I received these communications with great difficulty, because in the meantime my sleepiness was

getting worse. One day I suddenly wake up, perfectly clear minded. I had the impression I was

dreaming, and that in my dream someone was uncovering a grave, and that I was free to get out. At

this point I hear Lucy say: “It seems to me they just uncovered a grave, I feel freer now.” The

nightmare is over, for both of us, and I won’t have those weird phenomena anymore, true spells cast

by the witches.

Months later the story will clear up a little more. During a session Lucy brings a dream. She has a

doll in her lap. To her deep horror the doll starts to move and drags herself about the room. Then the

doll loses her bits, one by one, and Lucy, with growing horror, is forced to follow her and to pick

up these bits, one by one, realizing that the doll is alive, but at the same time inanimate. Nothing

comes to her mind, in association, but something comes to my mind. I ask her, with great caution, if,

by chance, she ever had an abortion. Terrified, she confesses that, as soon as she had arrived to

Milan she had gone out with a boy, whom she wasn’t really involved with, and immediately had

become pregnant. She had to undergo an abortion, hidden from her very sex phobic family. She had

never told this story to anybody, not even to her friends, and she had spent every single day after

that episode thinking of it with deep guilt and sorrow. “I think of that abortion every day.” I say

that it seems to me that with the abortion she had killed and buried also a part of herself. Maybe it’s

for this reason that she has been feeling for a long time as if she was buried in a grave. She answers

that it has been really like this for a long time, and that ever since she has perceived herself like

“someone no longer alive”. After the abortion she has never had a relationship with a man. She adds

that in these recent months, however, she had the impression to be no longer alone and that: “If I

was buried in a grave you were with me for sure.” I confirm her that I had the impression of having

gone through a very choking period too.

Bollas in his book The shadow of the object (1987) speaking of the unthought known, emphasizes

the relevance of the evocative mental process, through which important information on the self

state emerge from the deepest part of the Self. During the psychoanalytic dialogue the analyst too

can be in a state of not-knowing-yet-experiencing-one (Bollas). These experiences can often be

bodily experiences, like drowsiness, or stiffening, as widely described in psychoanalytic literature.

Also Thomas Ogden in his book The primitive edge of experience (1989) termed the psychological

organisation generating the most primitive state of being the autistic contiguous position. He

described briefly some possible countertransference responses to the analytic experience in an

autistic contiguous mode: “More specific to the autistic contiguous mode of experience is

coldness … as well as tingling, numbness”. The contact between the patient psychic primitive state

of mind and the analyst psychic primitive state of mind produces a countertransference

characterized by sensory-somatic experiences, especially when we are dealing with those traumatic

events which cannot be integrated nor worked out.

I want to comment briefly on the memory/trauma relation regarding this episode. In the

associations Lucy brought up to the doll’s dream, there was no memory of early traumatic

experiences, and the only association was with the abortion experience. That episode had taken the

shape of a highly dramatic experience inside the patient, the repetition, in my view, of previous

early traumatic experiences she couldn’t recall. She had never talked about the abortion with

anybody for twenty years. A friend she was living with at those times (and who knew the story) had

soon become a constant persecutory object in her nightmares. The abortion following a casual

sexual experience had in fact confirmed her worst sex phobic fears and her persecutory suspects

connected with the relationships with other people.

Actually Lucy’s dream refers not only to the abortion. Lucy represents with great efficacy the

perception of a growing and dramatic fragmentation of the Self, which goes together with the

transformation into an inanimate object. We are deep into that condition defined by Gaddini as

psycho-physical syndrome (1982) which is typically fragmentary and representative of a mental

functioning which precedes the integrative process. The non-integration is the first functional

organization of the Self, a fragmentary organization which must be distinguished from the

disintegration resulting form the anxiety of loss of the Self. The latter presupposes the existence of

a certain degree of integration, therefore a phenomenon which has regressed from a more advanced

state. In the first case, according to Gaddini, we must proceed for the first time from a non–

integrated functioning to integration, implying the integration of parts which had never been

previously integrated. Thus the analysis becomes the means through which we can restore the never

born, aborted parts of the Self, which are at risk of living a life of thei own as inanimate and

critically persecutory objects.

The experience lived by Lucy is absolutely terrifying. It’s an experience that can be communicated

only through contagion (projective identification), and which cannot have meaningful and

communicable ideational representations. The anxiety for the experience of the abortion mirrors in

analysis the anxiety for a possible abortive failure of the analytical experience. If the analyst goes

on sleeping he won’t be able to modify the barrier of unreality and lack of significance of the

patient.

Analysis in two movements, as I was saying in the introduction, meaning that only establishing a

really relational analytical modality one can develop the identification and counter identification

necessary to penetrate into the deepest layers of the unconscious and receive the primitive nonintegration anxiety of the patient.

“The deep work of the analysis with these patients should be carried out with careful attention to the

micro-phenomena, to the micro-fractures of time and space in the setting during the analytical

hour.” I was saying in the introduction.

I want to bring two fragments from two sessions, as an example of the micro- processes. They are

interesting because they evidence the remembering of the traumatic experience and its subsequent

transformation.

When Lucy starts the session she is particularly tense and nervous. She seems to fall into one of her

introspection states, absent and retreated from the background. She doesn’t speak and remains

indifferent to my attempts to stimulate her.

Slowly, without losing control, I become silent too, and I realize how the external environment

seems particularly noisy that evening.

My office is in a private street, where usually there is a big silence, but that evening, instead, we can

hear quarrels on the street, children crying, boys playing noisily. Furthermore my entry phone is

ringing, but nobody answers it. Lucy appears more and more irritated and annoyed, almost panicky.

At the end of the session, which she has passed almost completely silent, having said only: “I don’t

know what to say tonight, I don’t feel too well”, she gets up abruptly and goes out, clearly in

distress.

Next session Lucy seems happy and relaxed. She speaks of different episodes, but I understand I

cannot avoid talking about the previous session atmosphere. I tell her that the day before she looked

deeply disturbed by the external noises.

Lucy looks surprised, but also relieved: “Yes, I felt a peculiar annoyance yesterday, the noises

seemed to prevent me from concentrating on myself. Sometimes it happens to me, to be particularly

disturbed by the external world.”

I ask if this had happened also in the past, and if she remembers anything in particular.

Lucy has no doubts: “My father, of course. He was always shouting, there never was a moment of

peace when he was home. I was literally scared, because his furies were violent and

incomprehensible. Everything made him furious. I cannot stand noisy situations now. There was no

respect for me, for the fact I was studying or for any other thing I was doing. On Sundays he

decided to go to church and if we were late he would immediately shout. And if I wanted to go out

by myself he would shout again, because he disagreed. We couldn’t do anything, never.”

I tell her: “It seems to me that the most traumatic element was the lack of respect, the continuous

humiliation. Maybe yesterday here you felt the noises from the street and especially the entry phone

as an intrusion in your private time and space, totally similar to your father’s intrusions.”

Lucy: “It’s something that happens all the time, not only here. I always have the impression that the

others have no regards for me, that they have no consideration for me. Sometimes I’m afraid to

exaggerate, that it’s impossible that everybody is cross with me, but then I must give in and put up

with it.”

Analyst: “I think that yesterday you felt invaded in a particular tiring and needy moment of

introspection, and you felt you were being abused also in the analysis, thus repeating the same

situation of abuse and lack of consideration you experienced at home.”

In the transference repetition Lucy relives the intrusive noisiness of her father in the episode of the

noisy office and the entry phone disturbance, and in that situation the analyst becomes the

persecutory figure of her father. This experience, however, wouldn’t have been recalled, and so

much the less remembered by the patient, if the external noisiness wouldn’t have suddenly become

disturbing for the analyst as well,.

What I want to say is that through the projective identification of the patient, and the empathic

sharing of the analyst, a minimal episode, a small micro trauma in the session could be taken back

into analysis and connected to a precise mnesic image. As I said in the introduction, it was possible

to differentiate the present transferencial and counter transferencial elements of the analytical

situation from the past experiences only after we were able to recreate a different relational model,

characterized by attention, comprehension, and, above all, consideration for the other.

Starting from this episode we were able to activate a path of significance and mentalization (i.e. the

capability to elaborate sensorial and bodily sensations into accurate mental representations) of all

the frequent episodes of depersonalization and coenaesthetic misperceptions that she had

experienced on the couch. We found out that they were nothing but the activation of primitive

defensive somatic barriers toward the continuous family intrusion. Actually her mother also

showed a relational model based on intrusion and lack of consideration, although different from her

father’s.

In the next session Lucy says: “Yesterday I had a dream. I was here, in the session, lying across the

couch, and I was asking myself: “Would the analyst realize that there is something strange in my

position? That I’m lying in the wrong way? Then the entry phone rang and you went to open the

door, and it seemed to me that you were trying to stop a person from getting into the office. I got up

from the couch, to help you, and I saw a shadow on the stairs, who seemed very threatening. You

were trying to protect me and prevent this person from entering the room.” She then adds that she

was feeling better now and thought she was more confident and daring, with higher hopes toward

the future, compared to the last days.

I remark that the dream looks like a representation of what had happened in the previous session:

“You heard the noises as a threatening intrusion in your time and space, and you feared these noises

could penetrate into the analyst’s mind, and you were scared they could divert me from thinking of

you. The entry phone, more than anything else, was probably interpreted like another patient, trying

to occupy your time and your space. 4 On the other hand the analyst was perceived like your father,

who disturbed you with a complete disregard toward your intimacy. In the following session there

this experience had been recovered.”

This had allowed her to have a visual representation of the confuse and nameless terrors which so

often populated her fantasies and produced dramatic sensorial experiences of fragmentation and

depersonalization. The man at the door (the following patient?) appeared like an explicit threat seen

and shared by the analyst although perceived like a shadow by the patient. The implicit sexual

meaning of the terror experience was immediately recognized by Lucy, thanks also to the previous

work done together on her difficulties to have sexual relationships after the traumatic experience of

an abusive and violent father.

Something else was interesting in the dream: the first representation. Lucy sees herself lying across

the couch, obliquely, and asks herself if the analyst can notice how she is out of place. Also in this

case it seems to me that the perception that there is something deeply abnormal in her position is

activated and communicated. What I want to say is that in the dream a feeling, an emotion that up to

that moment had only been expressed through somatic misperceptions is now represented and

communicated through a visual representation. Very often, in the session Lucy seemed to fall in a

condition of trance, almost hypnotic, and she complained she could feel nothing of her body, no

legs, no arms, no trunk. In her past she had had some episodes of hysterical paralysis, which

brought her to the hospital, and all the episodes had occurred after particularly depressing and

humiliating events.

Discussion

Lucy presents herself to the analysis with an ordinary unhappiness, which until that moment she

had not considered a condition requiring help and change. She reveals a lot of faith in the mutative

possibilities of the analytical work, and finding a better job, more consistent with her social and

artistic expectations, is set as the main objective of the analysis. However those elements

represented only one aspect of Lucy personality, pathology and suffering.

In the movie Ordinary people, in the idyllic scenario of a rich suburban family we could soon

perceive a dramatic reality, encapsulated in the aseptic treatment by a psychiatrist who was

supposed to keep away the persecutory phantoms of the past.

Also Lucy’s problem soon appeared to be very little ordinary, charged as it was with anxieties and

pains unconceivable both by the analyst, in the beginning, and by the patient herself at a conscious

level.

The idyllic representation of the life in the small original agricultural community was shaken by

progressive disclosures of tragedies that had piled up in the years and in the generations.

Lucy’s father appeared to be the only survivor among seven brothers, who had died all in their

childhood because of various illnesses. The paternal grandfather had withdrawn the surviving child

from school, though he was very talented, and had called him back to work in the farm. The

paternal grandmother had then closed herself into a deep and furious resentment toward her

husband first and her daughter-in-law later, and kept herself removed from any human relationship

besides her only surviving son.

Lucy’s mother, on the other hand, had lost her father soon after her birth (he had died during the

war when he was not even 20), and had been left with her grandparents in Africa by her adolescent

mother.

Marriage had been for both the first love experience inside an affective life characterized for both

by aridity, inexperience, and above all a terribile loneliness. The birth of three children didn’t

improve too much the affective quality of their life. Father and mother seemed always soaked in a

kind of perennial mistrust (on the father’s side) and fear (on the mother’s side).

The experience of loneliness, carelessness and continuous emotional and physical neglect, the

repeated paternal verbal aggressions and abuses, the protracted exposures to the periodical maternal

depressions, the continuous distortions of the cognitive and emotional competences by the primary

objects, all this had been the warp and the weft of Lucy’s childhood. All these past experiences

were prolonged into the mistrust, into the suspiciousness, and into the non –integration anxieties of

her present life.

I think that in this phase of Lucy’s analysis I had needed the patience and the ability not only to

reconstruct the past traumatic experiences, but above all to transform in the transference the

emotional quality of the reception and of the listening as to the early (and not-early) traumas she

had experienced in her life. Only through the recognition of the unpleasant feelings, only through

the possibility of a true empathic sharing of these unpleasant feelings (where it is possible) we can

reach the deep level of the traumatic experience and underline the different quality of the present

experience.

I couldn’t had really understood the level of deep desolation and suffocation experienced by Lucy

in the intimate relationship with an absent object (her mother either depressed or engaged elsewhere

with the sister), if, on my turn, if I had not experienced myself for such a long time that feeling of

drowsiness and numbness which made me feel like a victim of a magic spell. As a child, too often

Lucy had perceived herself as a victim of some weird witchcraft, a prisoner of insurmountable evil

forces. The possibility to share these weird experiences with the analyst had allowed her to have

access to a visual representation (in this form communicable) of the absolutely terrifying

incorporeal phantoms of her past.

The following step of signification and mentalization (i.e. the elaboration into precise mental

representations of bodily and sensory experiences) of all the frequent episodes of depersonalization

and coenaesthetic misperceptions made them disappear in and out of the analysis and transformed

them into verbal communications, specific memories of past experiences, significative dream

representations (at first her dreams were populated only by persecutory figures, constant and steady,

with no past history or meaning). In conclusion, we were able to gain access to an analytical path

that was ordinary at last both for the patient and for the analyst.

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