ABSTRACT
The train was departing and the young girl, distraught at being taken away from her mother, looked at her standing on the station platform. A lot of time and sessions, but also long moments of troubled incomprehension, were necessary before this narrative could finally organise itself so simply and find the rhythm of its chronology by bringing together the fragmentary and painful traces. The analyst and his method were the guardians of this long process of giving shape to destructuring experiences: The slow work of putting things into words was facilitated step by step, word after word, during the sessions. For their part, with courage and obstination, finding in analysis the strength to grapple with images that are present but terrifying, some patients construct the narrative of their broken journey and let “the mass of sensations without words of affective memory, the subterranean and simmering life of Erlebnisse, ‘vivances’ or lived experiences” come to life.
