Catastrophism and catastrophic images: Ferenczi's identification with the aggressor and Ogden's autistic-contiguous position as defence mechanisms.

Abstract

Ferenczi's concept, the confusion of tongues between the child's language of tenderness and the adult's language of passion, explains that the child feels physically and psychically helpless and alone in the presence of an aggressor who disavows the traumatic acts, creating confusion for the child whether the traumatic experience happened at all. Fully dependent on the adults, the child adopts by introjecting the guilt and hate of the aggressor, in order to maintain the relationship with the adults. The confusion of tongues situation is linked to Ferenczi's complex construct, the identification with the aggressor, in understanding external traumas. With the concept of "autistic-contiguous position," Ogden identifies an area of pre-symbolic experience of a sensory nature, mainly centered on the surface of the skin as the starting point of mental life. These two concepts may permit us to be in touch with attitudes and beliefs in the exploration of individual and group defense mechanisms against climate change and environmental disasters. Using psychoanalytical knowledge, we can try to help people who are reluctant to fully acknowledge the seriousness of climate change, and so to change damaging behaviors in our relationship with the nonhuman world. The author critiques the repeated terrifying and bombarding images on TV and the Internet which would intend to inform about crises and disasters in the world, instead, those images paralyze psychic functioning. He describes how climate terrorism promotes the emergence of persecutory and primitive anxieties, even the activation of psychotic defenses. They foster the difficulties of getting in touch with deep-seated anxieties and remove a sense of responsibility and awareness of one's own participation in the creation of the damage.