Close encounters of a new kind in the psychoanalytic clinic. A changing affective semantic field requiring a psycho-socio-analytical approach

The reflection comes from the unexpected care needs that have become more frequent in recent years. Those questions challenge traditional approaches, both in form and content, urging a rethinking of the psychoanalytic setting. There are general sociological data to be referred to in order to understand the discomfort and difficulties encountered by young adults in the pathways of subjective individuation, but the relevant clinical data present in the implicit demands for treatment that I want to consider is that which highlights an ever-widening crisis of the word. I refer, as a psychoanalyst, to the crisis of the natural capacity of coming to the word, of giving language to what one feels. In the field of the psychotherapeutic relationship there is a constant exposure, a certain affective lability, made up of sudden extreme emotional oscillations. All this is accompanied by the denial of any form of definition in the changing boundaries between proprioception, interoception and esteroception. The demand for care itself is exposed to continuous crisis and at the same time charged with high expectations. There are states of anxiety and falls into anxious abysses in which imagination and dreams are dissociated in order to be protected from their frightening and delirious burden. The essay presents four cases in the opening of as many reflections on the method, in order to give readers the possibility of recognizing themselves in similar experiences of encountering questions of psychotherapy emerging from confused, opaque and ambiguous contexts, typical of the psychic distress present in the individuation processes of young adults. The proposal concerns the search for an agreement between theory and psychoanalytic technique that can be found in an affective semantic field able to contain and evolve those elements of external noise and social invasion in order to refine the setting and neutralize the obstacles to the tuning of the transformative therapeutic relationship.

Keywords: word crisis, preverbal, affective lability, anguish, conflict, anger, imagination, dissociation

Carla Weber, Incontri ravvicinati di nuovo tipo nella clinica psicoanalitica. Un campo semantico affettivo in trasformazione che richiede un approccio psicosocioanalitico in "SETTING" 49/2025, pp 41-52, DOI: 10.3280/SET2025-049003