Supervisors info:
Τζινιέρη-Κοκκώση Μαρία, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ
Αναγνωστόπουλος Δημήτρης, Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ
Μανιαδάκης Γρηγόρης, Επιστημονικός Συνεργάτης, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
The attempt to understand patients whose behavior is characterized by violent acts and self-destructiveness is the product of an ongoing psychiatric and psychoanalytic study by several authors (Perelberg, 1999, Campbell, 1995). Violence in these patients is often encountered through acting out, but also of turning these actions towards themselves. The definition of violence, as founded mainly in Glassers’s work (Glasser, 1979) describes it as “the intentional infliction of bodily harm on another person” (Perelberg, 1999, p.2) with the author giving an additional dimension to this violence, approaching it through the prism of self destructiveness. Violence can involve the desire for union with the object, such as the mother (Glasser, 1985) or the body being perceived as a separate object that is experienced absent or threateningly present. These acts have been associated with difficulties and disturbances in the functioning of the early relation to the object (Kernberg, 2004), attacks on linkings (Bion, 1962) or difficulty in thinking (Fonagy, 1995). Considering the above, a significant amount of studies have dealt with the shapes that the early mother-infant relationship can take, an area of occurrence of emotional fluctuations that carry the risk of merging and difficulty in differentiating the infant form the object. Of great importance, in the condition described above, is the paternal function, an object that does not only come from the outside but we assume that it exists in the mother’s thought and fantasies, having the father at the same time helping the child to separate from the mother, absorbing the aggression released by the child due to her loss.
Driven by what is written above, an attempt will be made through this paper based on the psychoanalytic approach of the concept of violence and self destructiveness, to develop and connect the role of the paternal function as a third object towards the mother-infant couple as well as the phenomena related to the absence of the father and how it is particularly associated with violence and self-destructiveness in these patients.
Keywords:
Violence, Self-destructiveness, Father, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
