Esquisse pour une psychopathologie psychanalytique de l’environnement

Abstract

Objectives

The environment is a concept that allows us to re-examine classical psychoanalytic psychopathology, starting with the nature of the symptom and the processes that structure it, then the notions of the normal and the pathological. This article thus proposes the main axes of a psychoanalytic psychopathology of the environment in an intersubjective dimension.

Method

We carry out a singular reading and analysis of Donald W. Winnicott's theories on the environment and the concepts related to it, in particular dependence, the self, aggressiveness, and repair. Then we describe their complementarities and their breaks with Anglo-Saxon theories, as developed by Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Michael Balint.

Results

There are different types of failures depending on whether the environment impinges affectively and bodily on the needs of the infant through seduction, torment, or disappearance. What matters is the moment of dependence during which they take place, generating either potentially a psychotic or manic-depressive organization at the moment of absolute dependence, or potentially an antisocial organization at the moment of relative dependence. The failures of the environment (Winnicott) can thus be considered complementary to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Klein), as well as to the concepts of ocnophilia and philobatism (Balint).

Discussion

The concept of environment also shows how motor skills constitute an important intersubjective experience in the construction of the self. In parents, this manifests itself above all in ordinary holding; in infants, in the aggressiveness at the origin of their spontaneous gestures, both destructive and creative, then becoming more broadly restorative in the family and social environments. Regression to dependence may become necessary for the exploration of primary experiences inherent to the individual-environment dyad, and may also have a function of intersubjective reintegration.

Conclusion

This sketch for a psychoanalytic psychopathology of the environment is therefore relevant for interpreting the sufferings of the self as intersubjective “disorders” and for analyzing clinical cases of regression to dependence in the analytic situation.