ABSTRACT
The film ‘Back to the Future’ is cited to illustrate the therapeutic potential for constructing a new history. The oedipal situation is described as a model for transformation, for the reconfiguration of a primal scene from which the subject can be regenerated.
This is only possible in a relationship – that is, the subject's internal objects must allow him to ‘visit’ and affect them. One of the principal therapeutic factors of analysis with adolescents resides in working through the countertransference of this specific challenge. In clinical analytic work the transgenerational appears as the result of a failure of this working-through. The transgenerational then appears as an intruder, a ‘cyst’ that settles somewhere and whose effects can be discerned in the defensive system organized to delimit and circumscribe it.
In very disturbed patients it is the objects who visit the ego, demanding collusive space or silence. The result is an ‘alienating identification’ (Faimberg, Green, Bollas) that hinders working-through. The Oedipus myth is explored to illustrate the vicissitudes of such intergenerational conflicts. In the repetition of relational patterns between generations, both affects and defensive modalities are transmitted by parents to their children.
Temporality is critical in adolescence. Adolescent pathology can indicate a delay in time, its arrest, and even its absence. In borderline states and especially in psychoses, the time of differentiation is absent – that of individuation and personalization, of becoming and projecting with the future in mind. The psychoanalytic experience can re-establish and again set in motion adolescent time through a process of posteriority, in which new meanings generated in the encounter between the adolescent and the analyst can allow the past to be transformed. In order to achieve this, the individual must actively acquire what is transmitted to him through psychic heredity.
A case study is reported as an example of alienating identification and its impact on the analyst, delaying therapeutic intervention because the patient is projecting instead of relating. The case also illustrates the author's view that projective identification should not be regarded as an early and ubiquitous primitive mechanism but should have a more restricted sense, as a phenomenon that is helpful in situations where there is a predominance of powerful psychotic anxieties of disintegration and loss of identity.
A change in technique is needed whereby the powerful bombardment of the patient's identification brings about a change in the analyst's attitude, activating a different comprehension (both emotional and cognitive) of the patient's communication. The therapeutic outcome is the patient's discovery of anxieties that were not his own, enabling him to distinguish his inner world from the other's.
