Writing as a play and first treatment of trauma

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Elisabetta Berardi
Publishing Year 2021 Issue 2021/1
Language Italian Pages 10 P. 124-133 File size 155 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSP2021-001008
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The author tells of a particular use of writing and specifically of “playing” with words, as a therapeutic or pre-therapeutic means useful for cooling down, indirectly addressing traumatic aspects and sometimes through narration, get out of identifying himself with the aggressor. The first experience reported is an atelier proposed to a group of girls as a game where starting from drawings, autobiographical texts, or extracts of selected novels, the material passed from hand to hand. In that way each one can pass from his/her hands to his/her mind and from the contribution he/she can make of it in term of signification, uniting with the significations of others and nourishing himself or herself with them, and at the same time protecting himself/herself from an exclusive and too deep contact with very incandescent psychic materials. In the other two experiences reported, the relationship is one to one, patient therapist, but even in these cases, playing with words is used, with their transit from one mind to another by means of the concreteness of paper and hands. The attention is placed in particular on the dynamic that is created when someone’s material is altered by someone else, which allows one to be touched by that material, and then returned it is given back to the sender in a sort of mediated reverié from the text.

Keywords: writing, trauma, game, repair, confusion, psychic survival.

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Elisabetta Berardi, La scrittura come gioco e prima cura del trauma in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 1/2021, pp 124-133, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2021-001008