by Paula Mandel, Ph.D.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE 

Lia Pistiner de Cortiñas, Discussant Roberto Oelsner
Saturday, March 19, 9:00 am - 12:00 pm, via ZOOM 

PINC International Visiting Scholar Lia Pistiner de Cortiñas discusses psychoanalytic treatment of patients who have serious difficulties in the psychic transformation of their emotional experience. 

How can a psychoanalytic process stimulate creative symbolization, transform emotional experience, and promote mental growth? International Bionian scholar Pistener de Cortiñas stresses the significance of a parental containing function in the psychic birth of emotional experience and the development of symbolization. She explores symbolic failure related to the obstruction of the development of phantasies, dreams, and dreamthoughts, while differentiating between symbolization disturbances related to hypertrophic projective identification and those related to emotional isolation. She suggests that arrested development of symbolization relates to a detention of projective identification and inaccessible caesuras that obstruct any integrative or interactive movement. These obstructions hinder the ability to modulate mental pain and to transform emotional experience. The varying defenses erected to avoid mental pain lead to psychotic, neurotic, or autistic functioning. Pistener speaks to the need, in a containing therapeutic relationship, for the development of an ideo-grammar (in gestures, paralinguistic forms, etc.) to transform sense impressions into proto-symbols - instruments that attenuate the traumatic experience of helplessness.